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 of those whom they sought to lead…. [T]hey had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses.”22 Wright meant to put this right, the proletariat had to be allowed its own voice. It was just as clear to him that he carried a particular, racial responsibility toward the Black working classes:

The Negro writer who seeks to function within his race as a purposeful agent has a serious responsibility … a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary; a consciousness which draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today…. [T]he Negro writer … is being called upon to do no less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die … because his writing possesses the potential cunning to steal into the inmost recesses of the human heart, because he can create myths and symbols that inspire a faith in life.23