cover image Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen

Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen

Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Ivan R. Dee, $26 (224p) ISBN 978-1-56663-824-1

Wallach’s biography of Richard Wright, to be published on the 50th anniversary of his death, gracefully traces and celebrates the writer’s rise from his hardscrabble Mississippi roots (unforgettably portrayed in Black Boy), his development of and dedication to his craft, and his physical and political peregrinations—to New York and left-wing circles, and later to Paris and the existentialists. Wallach’s book is thorough and almost pedagogical in its purposes; she excels at the lively anecdote and doesn’t shy away from her subject’s less savory aspects—his affairs and homophobia. But what’s absent is any trace of Wright’s voice as well as more perspective from his peers, readers, or critics to round out and provide depth and analysis to this study. This able biography summarizes where it should probe, and skates too smoothly over the conflicts and controversies that surrounded the man, who in his pursuit of freedom and unvarnished truth crossed racial lines, went into self-exile, and embraced the harshest social realism. (July)