Richard Wright was one of the most influential and complex African American writers of the twentieth century. Best known as the trailblazing, bestselling author of Native Son and Black Boy, he established himself as an experimental literary intellectual in France who creatively drew on some of the leading ideas of his time - Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism - to explore the sources and meaning of racism both in the United States and worldwide. Richard Wright in Context gathers thirty-three new essays by leading scholars relating Wright's writings to biographical, regional, social, literary, and intellectual contexts essential to understanding them. It explores the places that shaped his life and enabled his literary destiny, the social and cultural contexts he both observed and immersed himself in, and the literary and intellectual contexts that made him one the most famous Black writers in the world at mid-century.

‘Michael Nowlin's Richard Wright in Context makes a necessary intervention into the ongoing discussion over Wright's legacy … There are many innovative and ground-breaking essays in this collection … Like the best of Wright's work, this collection remains dialogic, receptive to the contradictions that produced Wright and animated the dialectical political formations of his writing.’

Benjamin Balthaser Source: American Literary History