Chapter 30 - Contemporary Reception

Summary

This chapter surveys Richard Wright’s contemporary reception, from his dramatic rise to literary fame through works of naturalist fiction, to the existential novels he wrote in exile, to his later nonfiction on the decolonization process in Africa and Asia. Although his career has often been reduced to a peak with Native Son and a subsequent decline, Wright’s complex and changing critical reception can best be understood through the shifting relationships between American literary intellectuals, discourses of race and racism, and global geopolitics. This chapter examines the political debates that lingered over Wright’s work from his earliest publications; it explains the critical resentment for his exile and interest in existentialism; and it emphasizes how his journalistic writing represents early, and generally well-reviewed, contributions to an emerging interest in the post-colonial world. These final books, too often overlooked today, offer important evidence of Wright’s ongoing interest in black leadership, the relationship between racial solidarity and liberal geopolitics, and the challenges facing an African diaspora.