A year after Wright’s sudden death, in 1960, at the age of fifty-two, a posthumous collection of his fiction, “ Eight Men,” was published. Yet the novel remains the work of Wright’s that occludes all others.Įven Baldwin admitted, eventually, that Wright possessed other registers. Baldwin wrote that Wright’s “ Native Son,” not unlike its foremother, “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” is undermined by its “virtuous rage,” and its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, “controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear.” Among certain jaded readers of the Negro canon (myself included), cultural memory has favored the younger writer’s discernment his distaste for “Native Son” lingers. Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” first published in 1949 (later collected in “ Notes of a Native Son”) made their aesthetic rift public, iconic. But besides differences of heritage and age-one a son of Mississippi, then Chicago the other of Harlem, a generation behind-they were separated by a formal disagreement about life on the page. Richard Wright and James Baldwin were drawn together as satellites of an American literary world contracted by prejudice.
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