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, Koestler, Lukács, Marcuse, Kolakowski) in the post–Second World War period than to any American fashion. Like many European Left intellectuals, Wright was moving beyond classical Marxism and the Marxism inspired by Lenin in order to come to terms with a world constituted of material and spiritual forces historically unique. Wright’s reach, consequently, can be said to be much longer than that implied by the terms employed by many of his American critics. He was never merely a “racial novelist,” a “protest writer,” or a “literary rebel.”13 Indeed, much of his work was a direct confrontation with the leading ideas and ideational systems of contemporary Western political and social thought. His arena was the totality of Western civilization and its constitutive elements: industrialization, urbanization, alienation, class, racism, exploitation, and the hegemony of bourgeois ideology. His work thus constituted an inquiry.