QUOTED
"Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread." - Native Son
"Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books…" - Black Boy
"Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness" - American Hunger
FICTION
- Native Son
Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s.
While not apologizing for Bigger's crimes, Wright portrays a systemic causation behind them. Bigger's lawyer, Boris Max, makes the case that there is no escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American since they are the necessary product of the society that formed them and told them since birth who exactly they were supposed to be.
"No American Negro exists", James Baldwin once wrote, "who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull." Frantz Fanon discusses the feeling in his 1952 essay, L'expérience vécue du noir (The Fact of Blackness). "In the end", writes Fanon, "Bigger Thomas acts. To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world's anticipation." The book was a successful and groundbreaking best seller. However, it was also criticized by Baldwin and others as ultimately advancing Bigger as a stereotype, not a real character.
(Wikipedia)
NON-FICTION
- Black Boy
Black Boy (1945) is a memoir by American author Richard Wright, detailing his upbringing. Wright describes his youth in the South: Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and his eventual move to Chicago, where he establishes his writing career and becomes involved with the Communist Party. Black Boy gained high acclaim in the United States because of Wright's honest and profound depiction of racism in America. While the book gained significant recognition, much of the reception throughout and after the publication process was highly controversial.
(Wikipedia) - Byline, Richard Wright
A selection of more than 100 newspaper articles written by Wright in 1937 and 1938 for the Daily Worker, plus two of Wright's essays for New Masses. "A writer perhaps best known for the revolutionary works Black Boy and Native Son, Richard Wright also worked as a journalist during one of the most explosive periods of the 20th century. From 1937 to 1938, Wright turned out more than two hundred articles for the Daily Worker, the newspaper that served as the voice of the American Communist Party.
(from book jacket)
POETRY
- Richard Wright and Haiku
In the last years of his life, Wright had become enamored of the Japanese poetic form haiku and wrote more than 4,000 such short poems. In 1998 a book was published (Haiku: This Other World) with 817 of his own favorite haiku. Many of these haiku have an uplifting quality even as they deal with coming to terms with loneliness, death, and the forces of nature.
(Wikipedia)
LITERATURE DATABASES
- Alexander Street LiteratureThis is a comprehensive, cross-searchable package of collections covering literatures of place, race, and gender.
- Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry OnlineThis database contains 250,000 poems in full text and 450,000 citations
- Films on DemandThese videos cover American Literature.
- Gale LiteratureThis database brings together many Literature databases.
- Gale: LitFinderHere you can find access to short stories, speeches, and plays.
- JSTORThis a huge database covering the humanities with access to very many academic journals and more.
- Project MuseThis database is a provider of digital humanities and social science content. It has access to academic journals and books.
- Scribner Writers SeriesThis includes 15-20 page signed essays on more than 2,000 authors and literary genres.
- Twayne Author SeriesHere you can find biographical information and literary criticism about world authors and their notable literary works.
- Twentieth-Century African American PoetryThis is a source for modern and contemporary African American poetry
- Women Writers OnlineThis is a full-text collection of early women’s writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University.