Charles Stevenson Wright's passionately idiosyncratic books have led to his being variously labeled by critics and reviewers attempting to harness his bountiful literary imagination in a phrase. He has, with some justification, been called a satirist, a black humorist, a surrealist, an experimentalist--even a phenomenologist. By virtue of the probing examinations of contemporary America which can be found in his slender, quasi-autobiographical novel The Messenger (1963); his devastating fantasy The Wig (1966); and the overtly autobiographical Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About (1973), Wright has earned an intense literary following. With Amiri Baraka's The System of Dante's Hell, Barry Beckham's Runner Mack, and Ishmael Reed's The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Wright's work adds tragic clarity to the nightmare of contemporary Afro-American existence.

Charles Stevenson Wright was born on 4 June 1932 and raised about twenty-five miles west of Columbia, Missouri, in New Franklin, whose approximately two hundred blacks comprised about one-quarter of the town's population...