SOURCE: "The Concept of Fear in the Works of Stephen Crane and Richard Wright," in Studies in Black Literature, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer, 1975, pp. 6-10.

In the following essay, Starr draws parallels between the responses to fear by protagonists in Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel" and The Red Badge of Courage and Richard Wright's "Big Black Good Man" and Native Son.

Richard Wright uses the concept of fear in at least three ways within his fiction which reflect similar utilizations of this concept within the fiction of Stephen Crane. Mainly, he follows Crane in the depiction of paranoiac fear. Secondly he uses fear in Native Son in much the same way that Crane does in The Red Badge of Courage. Finally Wright makes use of a more metaphysical concept of fear in two of his works ("The Man Who Lived Underground" and The Outsider), and this type of fear...