Prophet of the Storm: Richard Wright and the Radical Tradition

^-HE PRESENT DAY REEVALUATION of Richard Wrights' importance to the j black literary tradition in particular and American literature in general continues apace. After being relegated in the 1950s and 1960s by Baldwin and Ellison to the trashbin of because of his tendencies, Wright now emerges as the seminal figure in modern black fiction. Workshops treat his literary influence; seminars feature his works; critics explore his fiction for archetypal symbolism. But his essential importance for our time emerges not so much out of the literary qualities of his work as significant as they may be as out of the tendencies which these literary qualities act out in symbolic form. More precisely, his essential importance emerges out of his literary identification with a specific sociological vision of the life and destiny of black people in particular and human kind in general, a vision with which he consciously identified himself in his early literary career and from which he never strayed throughout his later fiction and nonfiction.' What I wish to do in this essay, then, is to examine this vision interpretatively as a philosophy, as a historical trend in American culture, and as a personal and ideological commitment forming the thematic context and center of Wright's key works. In the process it is hoped that the reader will form some insight into what, I believe, is the philosophical basis of the key movement emerging in the contemporary black struggle. This sociological vision is the great force of human history and the primary shaper of human destiny. For want of better terms I shall call this vision social humanism and its operation as ideology and as practice the Radical Tradition.2 Radicalism usually means to the layman any eccentric or extreme opposition to the status quo whether from the right or from the left. This is an incorrect definition. Denotatively, radical means root, from the Greek word radix. Connotatively, it refers to leftist doctrines in political throught not right wing ones. However, in order to define the Radical Tradition correctly and more conceptually, it is necessary to present a brief description of the comprehensive vision of humanity and society lying behind the Tradition, a vision which the Tradition expresses in specific theories and ideas (ideology) and in down-to-earth acts and programs growing directly out of those ideas (praxis). This Tradition, social humanism, has been expressed in many