Emergence of Richard Wright

This book is a study of the life, literary career, and social milieu of Richard Wright from his birth in 1908 through the publication of Native Son in 1940, with a glance in the final chapter at his withdrawal from the Communist movement and the beginning of his expatriation. The effort throughout has been to reconcile the varying claims of literary and social criticism, to examine Wright's early poetry and fiction both as works of the aesthetic and moral imagination and as events in the history of American racial protest. - Preface.