As Richard Wright rose to literary prominence in the 1940s, his became an authoritative voice for a white American audience minimally exposed to Black Chicago specifically and Black urban life more generally. In works like Native Son and 12 Million Black Voices, written after he left Chicago, Wright presents a consistently grim picture of the South Side as a place of suffering and of its residents as impoverished victims of ecological forces. Grounded in the theories of the Chicago School of Sociology, Wright’s prose creates an imaginative geography of “the ghetto” as a blighted, dangerous space that holds sway over the American cultural landscape for decades. With photographic evidence from the files of the Farm Security Administration, Nash illustrates both what Wright omitted from his representation of the South Side and how he manipulated images that he did include. He also discusses the presentation of Chicago in Wright’s posthumously published first novel, Lawd Today!, arguing that the picture Wright created of the South Side while he still resided there was both more nuanced and balanced than those he penned from a distance.

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.