from Part I - Life and Career, Times and Places
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2021
In 1927, Richard Wright arrived from Mississippi into Chicago, a city where he stayed for ten years, his most formative years as a writer and a period for him of political and intellectual radicalization. It was in Bronzeville, of course, where Bigger was born. Wright educated himself in Chicago within leftist literary circles, among the artists and writers of the John Reed Club, at the George Cleveland Hall Branch library, and through the interracial collaborations of the WPA’s Illinois Writers Project. Wright wrote stories while working on the project, including “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1938), and he collaborated on a provocative literary manifesto, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937). Wright met sociologist Horace Cayton Jr., for whom he wrote a forceful and luminous introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), co-authored by Cayton and St. Clair Drake. A kind of ars poetica, Wright’s introduction illuminates how the conditions of Chicago were also the conditions of European fascism, and how the psychological disorder wrought by racism was connected to the burgeoning struggles for decolonization in Africa. Wright also reveals his commitment to both a Chicago tradition of social realism and the experimental styles of transatlantic modernism.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.