Consistently an outsider - a child of the fundamentalist South with an eighth-grade education, a self-taught intellectual, a black man married to a white woman - Richard Wright nonetheless became the unparalleled voice of his time. The first full-scale biography of the author best known for his searing novels Black Boy and Native Son, Richard Wright: The Life and Times brings the man and his work - in all their complexity and distinction - to vibrant life. Acclaimed biographer Hazel Rowley chronicles Wright's unprecedented journey from a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi to Chicago's South Side to international renown as a writer and outspoken critic of racism.Drawing on journals, letters, and eyewitness accounts, Richard Wright probes the author's relationships with Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, his attraction to Communism, and his so-called exile in France. Skillfully interweaving quotes from Wright's own writings, Rowley deftly portrays a passionate, courageous, and flawed man who would become one of our most enduring literary figures.

About the Author

Hazel Rowley is the author of, most recently, Tete-a-Tete: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, which has been translated into twelve languages. During the writing of this book, she was a fellow at the Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard, a Rockefeller fellow at the University of Iowa, and a Bunting fellow at Radcliffe College, Harvard University.

Reviews

Richard Wright's story is already well known: a young black man, who grew up on a poor sharecropper's farm in Mississippi amid the terrifying violence of the segregationist South, goes to Chicago, where he fashions for himself a celebrated writer's life with the publication of Native Son. To retell this familiar story already told better by Wright himself in Black Boy and by Michel Fabre in his standard The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (LJ 4/15/73) Rowley (Christina Stead: A Biography) weaves an inordinate number of passages from Wright's work into an uninspired biographical pastiche. From these earlier works, we know that Wright struggled with his own writing life, his interracial marriage, his homosexual tendencies, and the unmitigated racism he found in the North after World War II. Although Rowley provides a bit more insight into Wright's relationship with Ralph Ellison than previous biographers, she is strangely silent on his contentious relationship with James Baldwin. Rowley writes in workmanlike prose and lacks any deep critical acumen. Finally, she focuses so much on defending Wright from his critics that the book is more hagiography than biography. Not recommended. Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

"Splendid....Richard Wright is well written, prodigiously researched, and nicely paced, a compelling evocation of the man, his craft, and the different worlds through which he moved." - Michael J. Ybarra, Wall Street Journal "A welcome and illuminating work....[Rowley] does an outstanding job....Rich and revealing." - Megan Harlan, San Francisco Chronicle "A magnificent biography, subtle and insightful....Rowley writes with style and grace, and her research on Wright is prodigious." - Howard Zinn, The Week "In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends....Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story." - Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of Books "Engrossing from the first page to the last." - Washington Post Book World"

Born into crushing poverty in rural Mississippi, Richard Wright (1908-1960) became one of the most celebrated African-American writers of his time, best known for the controversial Native Son and his autobiographical Black Boy. Wright spent his writing career bearing witness to American racism; in Native Son's unforgettable Bigger Thomas, he created a character too furious, uncompromising and vivid for mainstream white society to ignore. But Wright's literary success was not easily won. His Communist Party connections disbarred him from the establishment; his later renunciation of those same connections made him a pariah on the left, accused of pandering to white expectations. At this point, says Rowley, Wright was so embattled that he "could no longer see degrees of subtleties." Rowley (Christina Stead: A Biography) explores the roots of Wright's simmering fury and his conflicted drive toward social commentary. She renders accessible the facts of Wright's life and earnestly attempts to reconstruct his milieu. The narrative, however, is marred by its own sincerity: Rowley often succumbs to a biographer's rapt psychologizing ("five-year-old Richard had to help with the shopping... he felt proud to be so grown up"), and her efforts to enliven the story by resorting to present tense tableaux are ill-fated at best ("The big city is frightening. The traffic is chaotic.... What a din!"). These misguided stylistic choices make it difficult to consider Rowley's work with the gravity her research deserves; still, her competent treatment of Wright's life should satisfy those seeking to know more about the man behind the seminal work. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Aug. 14) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.