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	Henry Holt and Co. Aug 2001, hc $35.00

Richard Wright: the Life and Times
by Hazel Rowley

The first full-scale biography of the author of Black Boy and Native Son -- written with the dramatic drive of a novel.

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.

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.

biography