Bedford Public Library

Early works, Richard Wright

eng

Includes bibliographical references

no index present

fiction

Early works

Richard Wright

Library of America, 55

The author relates his life as an African American growing up in the South during the Jim Crow years. Wright presents a compelling story of a black man's attempt to escape his past and start anew in Harlem.This volume contains Wright's first novel Lawd Today!, published posthumously in 1963, and his collection of stories, Uncle Tom's Children, which appeared in 1938. Lawd Today! interweaves news bulletins, songs, exhuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of events of one day--February 12, Lincoln's birthday--in the life of a Black Chicago postal worker. The text for this edition reinstates Wright's stylistic experiments, and the novel emerges as a far livelier work of the imagination. Uncle Tom's Children first brought Wright to national attention when it received the Story prize for the best work submitted to the Federal Writer's Project. The characters in these tales struggle to survive the cruelty of racism in the South, as Wright asks "what quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity." All five stories Wright included in the 1940 second edition are published in this volume, along with his sardonic autobiographical essay "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow." --Inside cover