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Carpio, Glenda R.
2019.
The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright.
Article contents
Richard Wright and the Americanism of Lawd Today!
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Abstract
This essay examines Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's posthumously published novel, written in the 1930s but only made available to readers in 1963. Concentrating on the epigraphs that punctuate the novel, the essay demonstrates the significance of the social criticism of the 1910s and 1920s to Wright's formation as literary artist. In particular, Wright was drawn to the writings of the Young American critics, including Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank, whose criticisms of national ideologies furthered a commitment to “Americanism” as a horizon of social and cultural renewal. Wright's intellectual immersion in early twentieth-century US social criticism gave Lawd Today! a Young American critical imprint. Drawing upon the work of Ernesto Laclau on “populism,” the essay reads Wright's novel as invested in an “Americanism” that seeks to describe common features of early twentieth-century black migrant experience in the urban North in terms of larger national and modern dynamics.
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References
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11 Now defunct, Walker and Company published Wright's novel as Lawd Today in 1963, three years after the author's death. Among other changes, Walker and Company removed the exclamation point Wright had appended to the title. A new edition from the Library of America, published in 1991, restored the exclamation point and undid other changes, producing a text based on the final draft of Wright's novel available in the Richard Wright Papers in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. This essay makes use of the Northeastern University Press edition of Lawd Today!, cited above, which is the same as the unexpurgated Library of Congress edition. References to Wright's novel are included parenthetically within the essay.
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29 Ibid., 115.
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40 Laclau, 85–86.
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