Major works:
Uncle Tom’s Children • Native Son • Black Boy • The Outsider
“Nowhere in America today is there social or political action based upon the solid realities of Negro life depicted in Black Boy; perhaps that is why, with its refusal to offer solutions, it is like the blues. Yet in it thousands of Negroes will for the first time see their destiny in public print. Freed here of fear and the threat of violence, their lives have at last been organized, scaled down to possessable proportions. And in this lies Wright’s most important achievement: he has converted the American Negro impulse toward self-annihilation and ‘going-under-ground’ into a will to confront the world, to evaluate his experience honestly and throw his findings unashamedly into the guilty conscience of America.”
—Ralph Ellison (1945)
Books
