Abstract
That Richard Wright has attained a permanent niche in the pantheon of American literary history is now incontrovertible. Indeed, an entry on the author as novelist, short-story writer and critic is invariably found in the standard reference volumes, such as The Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, Who’s Who in Twentieth Century Literature, Literary History of the United States, et al. Generally speaking, however, the focal point of interest in such commentaries is the novel Native Son (1940); for it seems (with few exceptions) to be commonly accepted as the major literary and cultural achievement of its creator. Accordingly, the rave assessments of it have ranged all the way from Irving Howe’s cataclysmal conclusion of two decades ago that “the day Native Son appeared, American culture changed forever”1 to the recent subdued but nonetheless dogmatic assertion of Nathan Scott, Jr., that “it was not until the spring of 1940, when Harper and Brothers brought out Richard Wright’s Native Son, that the work of a Negro writer made, by its appearance, a truly salient event.”2