Chapter 2 - Richard Wright’s Chicago

Summary

In 1927, Richard Wright arrived from Mississippi into Chicago, a city where he stayed for ten years, his most formative years as a writer and a period for him of political and intellectual radicalization. It was in Bronzeville, of course, where Bigger was born. Wright educated himself in Chicago within leftist literary circles, among the artists and writers of the John Reed Club, at the George Cleveland Hall Branch library, and through the interracial collaborations of the WPA’s Illinois Writers Project. Wright wrote stories while working on the project, including “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1938), and he collaborated on a provocative literary manifesto, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937). Wright met sociologist Horace Cayton Jr., for whom he wrote a forceful and luminous introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), co-authored by Cayton and St. Clair Drake. A kind of ars poetica, Wright’s introduction illuminates how the conditions of Chicago were also the conditions of European fascism, and how the psychological disorder wrought by racism was connected to the burgeoning struggles for decolonization in Africa. Wright also reveals his commitment to both a Chicago tradition of social realism and the experimental styles of transatlantic modernism.