This collection looks not only at Wright's seminal works of fiction, but at his nonfiction and autobiographical writings as well. The editors join these reviews with essays by present-day scholars such as Houston Baker, Jr., author of Working of the Spirit and The Journey Back Claudia Tate, author of Black Women Writers at Work and Herbert Leibowitz, author of Fabricating Lives. Appiah, editors of Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, selected reviews of Wright's work by his contemporaries and colleagues, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Alain Locke - figures who now stand on their own in literary history. Many of Wright's stories were accounts of racially motivated violence that shocked the public at the time of publication and forced his readers to be aware of the horrors of racism in America. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but color.Since the 1940s, when Richard Wright published his best-selling Native Son, he has been one of the most widely read writers of his time and after.
Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to "pass" for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of black society at the turn of the century from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of ragtime. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man became a groundbreaking document of Afro-American culture the first first-person novel ever written by a black, it became an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standard and double consciousness that ruled the lives of black people in modern America.
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