"Wright was an American phenomenon. Lenin, during the Russian Revolution, looked at the jubilant former serfs who'd changed the course of history. Wouldn't he be thinking also of one like this one when he dreamed of creating a new man? Phenomena-especially Black ones-can't be measured by ordinary standards. Perhaps this is what W. E. B. DuBois had in mind when he said, "We struggle not only for the right of Blacks to be right but also for their right to be wrong!" Wright was a prodigious reader and he never failed to credit the extraordinary 10-year leap from semi-illiterate Black serf to literary giant to his discovery of Marx, Engels and Lenin, which subsequently led to his membership in the Communist Party. Mississippi had taught him to despise capitalist exploitation and injustice."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesExistentialistsAutobiographers from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Ollie Harrington, "The Mysterious Death of Richard Wright" in Why I Left America and Other Stories (1994)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Wright
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Richard Wright
Richard Nathaniel Wright (4 September 1908 – 28 November 1960) was an American novelist and writer of short stories and non-fiction.
130 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Richard Wright →
Related Quotes
"But the moment he makes the attempt his words falter, for he is confronted and defied by the inexplicable array of hi…"
"But, because the blacks were so close to the very civilization which sought to keep them out, because they could not …"
"I sensed, too, that the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more …"
"It was this intolerable sense of feeling and understanding so much, and yet living on a plane of social reality where…"
"But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives…"
"And in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American "cult…"
"I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore…"
"And then, while writing, a new and thrilling relationship would spring up under the drive emotion, coalescing and tel…"
"I don't know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don't know if the book I'm working on now will be a go…"
"The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-gen…"