Description
Book SynopsisConsistently an outsider - a child of the fundamentalist South, a self-taught intellectual, a black man married to a white woman - Richard Wright nonetheless became the unparalleled voice of his time. This title chronicles his journey from a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi to international renown as a writer and outspoken critic of racism.
Trade Review"Splendid....Richard Wright is well written, prodigiously researched, and nicely paced, a compelling evocation of the man, his craft, and the different worlds through which he moved." - Michael J. Ybarra, Wall Street Journal "A welcome and illuminating work....[Rowley] does an outstanding job....Rich and revealing." - Megan Harlan, San Francisco Chronicle "A magnificent biography, subtle and insightful....Rowley writes with style and grace, and her research on Wright is prodigious." - Howard Zinn, The Week "In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends....Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story." - Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of Books "Engrossing from the first page to the last." - Washington Post Book World"