Hazel Rowley. Richard Wright: The Life and Times.

Garrett, Daniel

New York. Henry Holt. 2001. 626 pages. $35. ISBN 0-8050-4776-X

"Is THIS THE DIRT ROAD, / Winding through windy trees, / That I must travel?" asked writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) in a haiku, number 131, written near the end of his life. Wright's haikus were not published in a book, Haiku: This Other World, until more than three decades after his death, and they are one more testament to what was not known about this famous writer while he lived. Wright's lyrical and polemical autobiography, Black Boy, and the grim ideological urban drama Native Son may be well-known references in American literature courses, but exclusive consideration of them have given us a narrow view of the author who also wrote the comic, experimental fiction Lawd Today!, the existential novel The Outsider, and Savage Holiday, a novel featuring no African Americans, as well as books on Africa, Asia, and Europe--Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain.

Richard Wright, born to a sharecropper father and schoolteacher mother in Mississippi, endured a childhood of poverty, familial misunderstanding, religious dogmatism, and racial prejudice. He distinguished himself when young by writing a short story that was published and being selected as a representative of his grade-school class. Reading H. L. Mencken in the late 1920s introduced him to literary and social criticism and to writers such as Dreiser, Lewis, and Anderson. Wright moved to Chicago, where he worked in the post office. He became a member of the John Reed Club and through it met other writers, became a member of the Communist party, and then moved to New York, where he wrote for a party publication. Wright's first book, the short-story collection Uncle Tom's Children, was published in 1938 and received good reviews. Two years later, with Native Son, Wright became an important American writer. Wright married Ellen Poplowitz in 1941, published Black Boy in 1945, and visited France the next year and moved there with Ellen in 1947, where he would live, work, and die.

Hazel Rowley's biography of Wright may not be elegant or eloquent (it is rather plain and slow-moving) but it is the most factual and fair--and the most intelligent--biography of Wright that I am aware of, and it allows future generations to inherit a Wright who is whole, at once man, thinker, and writer. Richard Wright was handsome, likable, and hardworking, with a voice that ranged from high to baritone, a man with the cool confidence of a jazz musician--he liked to talk and laugh and be with friends, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (One friend, Gertrude Stein, betrayed him by introducing him to a thief and then by refusing to acknowledge the theft of Wright's property, which included penicillin for Wright's daughter.) Wright was, surprisingly, a sexual swordsman who put his marriage to Ellen at risk. Rowley's book is also interesting for addressing the rumors surrounding Wright's death (CIA? femme fatale?). Rowley investigates Wright's medical treatment, which included the taking of bismuth for intestinal disorders, a prescription given by a doctor who made Wright's friends uneasy. Oral bismuth was then popular in France, but would later be known to cause heavy-metal poisoning leading to kidney and liver failure.

Richard Wright's legacy is a complex one--at once aesthetic, intellectual, and political. Intelligent interpretation is what Wright tried to provide in his own work, but not always what he received for his own efforts. Wright's work was censored before publicationmfor instance, the sexuality of Bigger Thomas was excised from Native Son, and after publication his work was sometimes misunderstood or misrepresented. A 1957 New York Times review of Wright's White Man, Listen! called the book "argumentative, belligerent and often wrong-headed." It then went on to summarize how correct Wright was in many of his positions but reprimanded him for not understanding well enough the threat of communism (Wright joined then abandoned the Communist party). African American novelist David Bradley once said that Wright seemed a "cold-blooded intellectual." Feminists more recently have questioned his work's treatment of women and his dismissal of Zora Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. However, Wright was for himself and for others a one-man university system. Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and other women writers acknowledge his active support of their early careers; and Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Gordon Parks admitted his influence, although Wright's tying literature so closely to politics may have become a burden to subsequent writers.

"All of my life had shaped me to live by my own feelings and thoughts," Wright wrote in Black Boy. Hazel Rowley's necessary biography of Wright is preceded by other books on the life and work of Richard Wright, resources that can help to place the efforts of this controversial writer in the most comprehensive of contexts. Wright brought not merely heat but light; he was, in the words of one of his own haikus (#647), a fire: "Burning out its time, / And timing its own burning, / One lonely candle."

Daniel Garrett

Queens, New York