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  • Chapter 26 - Wright and Les Temps Modernes

  • from Part III - Literary and Intellectual Contexts
  • Edited by Michael Nowlin, University of Victoria, British Columbia
  • Book:
    Richard Wright in Context
    Published online:
    08 July 2021
    Print publication:
    22 July 2021, pp 273-282

  • Summary

    Wright’s connection to the postwar Parisian literary-intellectual journal Les Temps Modernes and collaborative friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir helped quickly establish him in France as, in Paul Gilroy’s words, “the first black writer to be put forward as a major figure in world literature.” This essay gives an overview of the various reasons that Wright was a good fit for the journal and its existentialist politics and the journal and its politics a good fit for Wright. But it also looks critically at a certain asymmetry to the relationship rooted in post-war Franco-American relations. It challenges the notion that Wright became a doctrinaire “existentialist” and suggests rather that he gained most from the journal and his friendship with Sartre the versatile, prophetic model of intellectual engagement already imminent in his autobiographical self-portrait. The connection influenced his novel The Outsider less than the non-fiction books of the 1950s.