Richard Wright is dead now and I have no intention of belaboring his memory; but he was simply not a good writer, not even a competent one, and it might be useful to make a notation upon what the sources of his reputation were. I think it clear that he was one of those authors about whom circumstances gather to distill extraliterary excitement and interest, in his case of course the circumstance being the fact that he was Negro and the first of his race to write about what that meant, in full acceptance of its terrors, frustrations and imposed shame.

I haven't read Native Son in many years. But if I say that I remember fairly vividly how it jolted me, as it did so many others, it is also true that the jolt was of the sociological order, not the esthetic, impelling me into recognitions that...