Chapter 29 - Wright’s Many Lives and the Travails of Literary Biography

Summary

When Richard Wright died in Paris on November 28, 1960, scholar Michel Fabre was ready to embark on a dissertation that would deal with the life and work of the metaphysical poet John Donne. His tutor at the Sorbonne redirected his project toward Richard Wright, since a PhD dissertation, or “state thesis,” could only deal at the time with a deceased author. Such is the genesis of The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, Fabre’s biography that led him to found and head the field of African American Studies in France while being recognized internationally as a leading scholar on Wright. For her part, Margaret Walker, an acclaimed writer and scholar of Southern literature, knew Wright in Chicago in the 1930s where both were members of the Federal Writers’ Project and the South Side Writers Group. Her own biography, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius, subtitled A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at his Work (1988), is a very personal text that contrasts with Fabre’s more traditional endeavor, shaped as the latter is by the format of the French university system.