SOURCE: "Richard Wright and the Blues Connection," in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 393-408.

In the following essay, Dick links the influence of blues music on the works of Richard Wright with that of his contemporaries Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison.

Of the major twentieth-century African-American writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison are famous for celebrating their forebears' folk roots. Hurston secured a permanent place among eminent American folklorists after the release of Mules and Men (1935), her monumental study of black American folk beliefs. Ellison also joined the first rank of American writers with the publication of Invisible Man (1952), which traced a young black man's coming to terms with his folk past. Although critics rarely say so, the same folk interests that kindled the writings of Hurston and Ellison also inspired the works of Richard Wright, their contemporary.

Wright recognized the important value of African-American...