SOURCE: Mason, Theodore O., Jr. “‘Mapping’ Richard Wright: A Response to Deborah Barnes' ‘I'd Rather be a Lampost in Chicago’: Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance of African American Literature.” Langston Hughes Review 14, no. 1-2 (spring-fall 1996): 62-4.

In the following essay, Mason offers an assessment of Wright's literary reputation, remarking on the confluence of contemporary influences on his work.

In her essay on Richard Wright, Deborah Barnes' essay moves us happily, in the main, toward a reconsideration of African American literary and cultural history from the mid-twentieth century. One of the curiosities of that history is the fashion in which New York in general and Harlem in particular seem to dominate out of proportion to their real significance. In the symbolic geographies of our collective literary and cultural history Harlem appears just as New York does in that now famous cover of The New Yorker, where the shift...