Henry Holt & Co., Aug 2001, $35.00

October 12
Hazel Rowley
Richard Wright: The Life and Times

"Writing," Richard Wright once said, "is my way of being a free man." In this authoritative and engaging biography, Hazel Rowley chronicles Wright's extraordinary journey from a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi to international renown as a writer, fiercely independent thinker, and outspoken critic of racism. The child of the fundamentalist South with an eighth-grade education, a self-taught intellectual in the working-class Communist Party of the 1930s, a black man married to a white woman, and an expatriate in France after World War II, Wright was always an outsider. Skillfully interweaving quotations from Wright's writings, Rowley portrays a man who transcended the times in which he lived and sought to reconcile opposing cultures in his work. She draws on recently discovered material to shed new light on Wright's relationships with Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and others, and on his self-imposed exile in France (widely blamed for his so-called decline as a writer). In this lively, finely crafted narrative, Wright -- passionate, complex, courageous, and flawed -- comes vibrantly to life.

Praise for Richard Wright
"Riveting...In Hazel Rowley's incisive and engrossing appreciation of a literary career spanning two continents, Richard Wright now has a biography that takes full measure of the significance of his celebrated, tortured, volcanic passage." -- David Levering Lewis, author of W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, winners of the 1994 and 2001 Pulitzer Prizes for Biography.

"Hazel Rowley's Richard Wright is all that one can reasonably hope for in a biography, and yet so much more. Tirelessly, imaginatively researched and elegantly written, it examines this enigmatic native son with an exacting but also finely sympathetic eye. The result is a portrait of uncommon penetration and skill -- surely one of the finest literary biographies to appear in many a year." -- Arnold Rampersad, Professor, Stanford University, and author of The Life of Langston Hughes

Hazel Rowley is the author of Christina Stead: A Biography, a New York Times notable book. She has taught at the University of Iowa and at Deakin University in Melbourne and was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.