Wright’s literary career was encouraged by the Communist Party-sponsored John Reed Club and nurtured within the proletarian literary movement whose writers were committed to representing class inequality and warfare from the standpoint of the eventual triumph of the proletariat. Like many other proletarian writers, his fiction is, therefore, strongly influenced by the philosophy of dialectical materialism popular within the Communist movement. Wright’s fiction, notably Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, powerfully synthesizes a dialectical perspective with literary realist and naturalist representational techniques, although he also experimented with avant-garde literary techniques he associated with the likes of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, as evident in Lawd Today! His fiction depicts the ways in which his mostly poor, working-class black characters suffer intensely from the class system of capitalism and the racism it engenders. It also depicts the inherent potentials within his characters’ lives to transcend ideologically and materially the inimical social system at the root of their suffering.

This essay contests the prevalent view of Richard Wright as a proponent of violent black masculinity.  Beginning with Uncle Tom’s Children, I argue, Wright provides a radical critique of the very ‘macho’ violent wish-fulfillment he has been accused of endorsing.  Stories such as "Big Boy Leaves Home," "Down by the Riverside," "Long Black Song" and "Ethics of Living Jim Crow" underscore the cruel ironic bind of black masculinity under Jim Crow: Black male children can be punished as “men” for the slightest perceived misstep, even while grown Black men are forced to assume the permanent position of “boys,” forever deferential to white authority.  Wright confronts us with the trauma of black male vulnerability, while also interrogating the complex and contradictory psychological reactions and socio-political responses such vulnerability gives rise to.  His work grasps the impulse to black masculinism as an understandable response to the particular historical circumstances of Jim Crow, while at the same time underscoring the strategic liability of such violent and individualist reactions.  Ultimately, Wright suggests that it is only the concerted response of the larger black community that offers black boys and men alike a chance of meaningful resistance.