One would like to think that the recent flurry of interest in Richard Wright (I write in the unquiet spring of 1969) is not just a by-product of the fashionable enthusiasm for "Black American Literature," but rather an effort to render at last his due to a man praised too soon for the wrong reasons and too soon dismissed for more wrong reasons. One doubts, however, that this man who so much longed to be recognized as an individual would be freshly honored except as a racial symbol. In death as in life, Wright has been forced to win as a Negro who happened to be a writer the recognition that he desired as a writer who happened to be a Negro.

Although much of Wright's best work was done during the 1930s, he was virtually unknown outside the cliquish ranks of the native Communists until 1940 when Native Son...