Visit our companion site,
American Passages. Produced in conjunction with Oregon Public Broadcasting, this rich site includes an archive featuring over 3,000 images, audio clips, presentation software, and more.
Instructors now have an easy way to collect students’ online quizzes with the Norton Gradebook without flooding their inboxes with e-mails.
Students can track their online quiz scores by setting up their own Student Gradebook.
Authors
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) and Richard Wright (1908-1960)
« back to list of Authors
Among primary documents are The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe (1970), edited by Richard S. Kennedy and P. Reeves; The Autobiography of an American Novelist, by Thomas Wolfe (1983), edited by Leslie Field; The Letters of Thomas Wolfe (1956), edited by Elizabeth Nowell; The Letters of Thomas Wolfe to His Mother (1968), edited by C. Holman and S. Ross; My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein (1983), edited by Suzanne Stutman; Beyond Love and Loyalty: The Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Elizabeth Nowell (1983), edited by Richard S. Kennedy; and To Loot My Life Clean: The Thomas Wolfe–Maxwell Perkins Correspondence (2000), edited by Matthew Bruccoli. The fullest biography is Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987), by David Herbert Donald. A Thomas Wolfe Companion (1987), by John Lane Idol Jr., is informative and useful. John Earl Bassett compiled Thomas Wolfe: An Annotated Critical Bibliography (1996). There were many critical studies of Wolfe in the 1950s and 1960s. Later books include Carol I. Johnston’s Of Time and the Artist (1996) and Robert Taylor Ensign’s Lean Down Your Ear upon the Earth, and Listen: Thomas Wolfe’s Greener Modernism (2003). Collections of critical essays are Thomas Wolfe: Three Decades of Criticism (1968), edited by A. Field; Thomas Wolfe: The Critical Reception (1974), edited by P. Reeves; The Loneliness at the Core: Studies in Thomas Wolfe (1975), edited by C. Hugh Holman; and Critical Essays on Thomas Wolfe (1985), edited by John S. Phillipson.
Wright’s fiction includes Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Native Son (1940), The Outsider (1953), and Eight Men (1961). Black Boy (1945) is his autobiography; White Man, Listen! (1957) is an important work of nonfiction. The Library of America has published his writings in two volumes, including an unexpurgated version of Native Son (1991). For a complete bibliography of his writings, see Richard Wright: A Primary Bibliography (1982), compiled by Charles T. Davis and Michel Fabre. A good example of reviews can be found in Richard Wright: The Critical Reception (1978), edited by John M. Reilly; a massive bibliography of Wright criticism around the world has been assembled by Keneth Kinnamon (1988). Kinnamon and Michel Fabre edited Conversations with Richard Wright (1993). The best critical biography is Fabre’s The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1993); see also Margaret Walker’s Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius (1993) and Hazel Rowley’s Richard Wright: The Life and Times (2001). Critical studies include Russell C. Brignano’s Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works (1970), Kinnamon’s The Emergence of Richard Wright (1972), Fabre’s Richard Wright: Books and Writers (1990), and Robert Butler’s Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero (1991). Abdul R. Jan Mohamed’s The Death-Bound- Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (2005) is an ambitious theoretical study. Collections of criticism are Yoshinobu Hakutani’s Critical Essays on Richard Wright (1982); Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah; The Critical Response to Richard Wright (1995), edited by Robert J. Butler; Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays (1995), edited by Arnold Rampersad; and Kinnamon’s Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s Native Son (1997).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Wright was a few years younger than Wolfe, and both men wrote fiction that responded strongly to the legacy of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, and Thomas Hardy. Both wrote stories with high emotional intensity and scope, stories of growing up, facing adversity, and feeling supremely alone. When Wolfe wrote satirically about his home town in Asheville, North Carolina, he became virtually an exile there; Wright fled his native Mississippi and Tennessee, first for New York, and finally for permanent residence in France. We can read “The Lost Boy” and “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” as stories about profound isolation, and about the failure of words, spoken or written to break down barriers.
1. Compare the opening paragraphs of the two stories. Describe the differences between these beginnings – how they each establish a perspective, a camera-angle, and a mood.
2. Wolfe’s story is set against the backdrop of the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, a lavish event held to mark the centennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition; Wright’s story is set in a nameless and generic small town somewhere in the Deep South. Look for images of that early world’s fair, and also for images of rural African American life in the South early in the twentieth century, the years that Wright is apparently remembering in this story. What do these very different backgrounds accomplish in helping us understand the desperation of these characters?
