Detailed Reading List and Study Questions for Richard Wright’s Work

Reading List

Primary Texts

Uncle Tom’s Children (4 stories)* Black Power
Native Son* Rite of Passage
Black Boy* Haiku, This Other World
The Outsider* Twelve Million Black Voices (excerpt)
Eight Men (4 stories) *Harper Perennial Editions

Study/Discussion Questions Suggested by Dr. Jerry W. Ward Jr., Dillard University

Uncle Tom’s Children

  1. What does each story in this collection challenge readers to consider about the South and a sense of place?
  2. Do female and male readers response in radically different ways to "Long Black Song"?
  3. What are the main social issues in "Big Boy Leaves Home"?
  4. Does "Down by the Riverside" seem to have unusual significance if we compare the Mississippi River flood of 1927 and Hurricane Katrina?
  5. What is the importance of Christianity in "Fire and Cloud" and " Bright and Morning Star"?

Native Son and Rite of Passage

  1. How does Wright’s depiction of adolescent psychology in Native Son differ from his treatment of the juvenile mind in Rite of Passage?
  2. How does Wright use stereotypes in Native Son? In Rite of Passage?
  3. How does the narrative voice function in Native Son?
  4. Is Book III of Native Son a sociological critique of Books I and II?
  5. To what extent does Wright’s essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” help us to understand his characterization of Bigger Thomas in Native Son?
  6. How does the modification of plot in the film versions of Native Son affect our regard for the novel?

Black Boy

  1. How does Black Boy challenge conventional ideas about what the bildungsroman/autobiography should be?
  2. In reading autobiography, how concerned should we be about separating fiction from fact?
  3. How did Wright's understanding of prejudice shape his responses to life in the South and in the United States?
  4. Are the traumas Wright experienced in childhood and youth responsible for his essentially negative portrayal of women?
  5. Can we discover parallels between the blues and Wright's autobiography?
  6. Why was Wright initially attracted to Communism, and why did he ultimately reject it?
  7. What does Black Boy reveal about Wright’s affinity for existentialism?
  8. What features of Black Boy mark it as a work of art? What features mark it as a document in African American history?
  9. What strategies does Wright use to assert his agency in controlling self-representation and in resisting the constraints of ethnicity and language?

12 Million Black Voices

  1. Wright subtitled this book "A Folk History of the Negro in the United States." What is folk history?
  2. Wright noted that even if black schools "were open for the full term our children would not have time to go." What does Wright help us to grasp about education for blacks in the twentieth-century rural South?
  3. Do the Farm Security Administration photographs and Wright's text operate in harmony?
  4. Does Wright betray a Marxist bias in his conceptualization of the book?
  5. Is 12 Million Black Voices an atypical example of the photo-documentary books published in the 1930s and 1940s?

Eight Men

  1. Does "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" teach a lesson about the consequences of adolescent rebellion?
  2. Does "The Man Who Lived Underground" cast a strong light on the issue of marginal identity in American culture?
  3. Does "Man, God Ain't Like That" seem to defy interpretation?
  4. What is noteworthy about Wright's representation of race in these eight stories?
  5. Why might some readers find the stories in Uncle Tom's Children more satisfying than those in Eight Men?
  6. How successful is Wright in representing varieties of black masculinity?

This Other World: Haiku

  1. How might reading Wright's haiku illuminate his profound humanism?
  2. Is there a strong relationship between Wright's use of images in his prose and in the haiku?
  3. How faithfully does Wright follow the aesthetic imperatives of classical haiku?
  4. What impression of Wright's sensibility do we gain from reading 817 of his haiku?
  5. What is the "other world" referred to in the title of the collection?

Black Power

  1. What cultural presuppositions influence Wright's observations about the Gold Coast [Ghana]?
  2. How does Wright feel about being an African American in Ghana? Is his ambivalence extreme?
  3. What primary audience does Wright address in his travelogue?
  4. How might we judge Wright's advice to Kwame Nkrumah?
  5. What does Wright try to communicate in his bold statement: THE WEST IS BEING JUDGED BY THE EVENTS THAT TRANSPIRE IN AFRICA?
  6. What does Wright reveal to use about the limits of being a person of the West?
  7. What distinction should be made between Wright’s use of the term “Black Power” and the use of the term in the US after 1966?
  8. What various kinds of writing make up Black Power (i.e. journalism, travelogue, history, etc)

The Color Curtain

  1. What was the Bandung Conference?
  2. How does Wright deal with issues of political alignment?
  3. What is Wright's attitude toward Communism in 1955?
  4. What might be valuable in Wright's refusal to assume an objective journalistic posture in the book?
  5. Does Wright's treatment of religion and race help us to understand why these topics continue to have great importance in world affairs?

White Man, Listen!

  1. What did Wright hope to accomplish with the publication of these essays?
  2. Does Wright contradict himself by at once criticizing and embracing Western ideas about tradition and industrialization?
  3. Why might Wright's commentary on the psychology of the oppressed deserve special attention?
  4. Is Wright's attempt to make a prophetic statement in the final paragraph of "The Literature of the Negro in the United States" still relevant?
  5. What can be learned about the Cold War period from reading the political essays in this collection?

The Outsider

  1. How does Wright portray problems of identity in the life of Cross Damon?
  2. The story Wright tells about a Black man who lives as an outsider can be applied to the lives of many ordinary black men. Is it possible for Black women to “live in Damon’s shoes?” Is Damon’s outsideness determined by gender?
  3. Violence resonates throughout the novel. What might Wright be attempting to express through the final scene in the apartment (think of Wright’s ideas about racism and Communism in 1952)?
  4. Does Damon’s outsideness enable him to develop an objective perspective on life and society
  5. Several scholars have commented on Outsider being very autobiographical (Graham, Reilly, Walker). How would you respond to this?
  6. Does Wright balance Damon’s outsideness with a private sense of insideness?
  7. Do you discern an attitudinal kinship between Mersault in Camus’s The Stranger and Damon in The Outsider?
  8. Does Wright successfully blend Marxism, existentialism, and racism in the novel?

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