"Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can't find its way to a human path, if it can't inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain." These words, written in the late 1940s, stand as a fitting epitaph for the writer who wished to "build a bridge of words" between the two racial worlds. Often called the father of African-American literature and among the most influential black American authors of the twentieth century, Richard Wright was one of the first African-American writers to win a major reputation in U.S. letters. The southern-born Wright was the first black novelist to write of life in the ghettos of northern cities and of the rage felt by blacks at the white society that excluded them.

"I would...