With the rise of black studies programs throughout the country, an omnibus collection of Wright's work was inevitable. The author's widow, Ellen Wright, and Michel Fabre … have assembled a broad sampling of Wright's work…. Although the [Richard Wright Reader] is weighted toward Wright's fiction, there are representative selections from his correspondence, his poetry, his political and literary essays, and his travel writing. (p. 46)

Surveying its scope, we see that a man's past is never really dead. For Wright, the formative experiences were his mother's religious fanaticism (she was a Seventh-day Adventist), with its crippling repressions and proscriptions, and the virulent racism that confronted him at nearly every stage of his determined search for self-realization. Brutalized and misunderstood by both his family and his society, Wright developed personal characteristics that were reflected in most of his writing: rebelliousness, introversion, a quest for selfhood, a longing for stable and meaningful...