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Wright took this responsibility as a proletarian writer quite seriously. He was committed to the task of expressing working-class thought, consciousness, and experience. One recollection of this period is his first impression of the party: “The Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience …

When we consider Richard Wright’s fictional and explicitly political work, three novels (Native Son, The Outsider, and “Island of Hallucination” this latter eventually published under the title American Hunger) and one collection of short stories (Uncle Tom’s Children) stand out. Together, these wo…

More remarkable, however, than the sheer survival of Wright’s work, is the theoretical and analytical power of his ideas. This achievement of Wright’s, with the stimulus of historical materialism and psychoanalysis, fell much closer to an emergent European literature (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Koestle…

This last identification, though, was to prove to be an ambiguous one. In the minds of Black intellectuals, within a quarter of a century, the significance of the Third International had substantially degenerated. For some, like Padmore, and later Cox, international Communism (Stalinism) was simply…

In one sense the first systemization of Black radical historiography was constructed by figures such as G. W. Williams, J. J. Thomas, Du Bois, James, and Padmore for precisely the complex reasons suggested by James when he wrote on revolutionary leaders: they had directly profited from the “cultura…