500 Making It New: 1900–1945stories and articles, out of the emotional impact of imaginative construction of
heroic or tragic deeds, that I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth from an unseen
light.” Following that light, and full of hope, Wright traveled north to Chicago in- “I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels,” Wright remembered.
“The North symbolized for me all that I had not felt and seen; it had no relation
whatever to what actually existed.” Like so many others involved in the Great
Migration, Wright had his dreams of a better life shattered, encountering only new
forms of racial oppression and economic deprivation when he went northwards. He
did, however, find comradeship in the John Reed Club and in the Communist Party,
which he joined in 1936. That comradeship was short-lived perhaps. Within a year,
he had broken with the party because of its attempts to control his intellectual and
creative freedom. But he did continue to work with others, black and white, of similar
social and political commitment. “The ideological unity of Negro writers and the
alliance of that unity with all the progressive ideas of our day,” he wrote in “Blueprint
for Negro Writing,” “is the primary prerequisite for collective work.” So, as well as
editing New Challenge with Dorothy West, he wrote proletarian poetry for New
Masses and Partisan Review; he served as a correspondent for the Daily Worker; and
well up to the publication of Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), an illustrated folk
history of African-Americans, he tried to work out the relationship between the
techniques of fiction and the tenets of Marxism.
For Wright, the best way of working out that relationship was in his own fiction.
Even before moving to New York City in 1937, he had written most of his novel
Lawd Today, which was published posthumously in 1963. And in 1938, his first
book, Uncle Tom’s Children, was published. A set of four novellas set in the Jim Crow
South, the book casts an ironic light on its own title by showing a series of protagonists
becoming increasingly rebellious – less and less accommodating to white demands –
as they find the collective means to resist. “I wanted to try to build a bridge of words
between me and the world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that
it seemed unreal,” Wright recalled in the second volume of his autobiography,
American Hunger (1977). And bricks for that bridge were found, not only in certain
systems of thought he found congenial, particularly the Marxist analysis of society
and the Freudian system of psychology, but in literary naturalism. “All my life had
shaped me for realism, the naturalism of the modern novel,” he wrote. Of the
African-American folk tradition he was less certain. In Black Boy he was to talk of
“the cultural barrenness of black people,” “the essential bleakness of black life in
America,” which he put down to the fact that, as he put it, “Negroes had never been
allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization,... they lived somehow in it
but not of it.” For him, identity was a social construct, cultural not natural: it had to
be “won, struggled, and suffered for.” And, just as he had been denied the chance to
learn who he was while he stayed in the South so, he felt, African-Americans had
been denied a similar knowledge. The cruelest blow white society dealt them was to
exclude them from a sense of fully being in the world. Still, that did not stop Wright
from believing, with fierce pride, that he had made a self, made himself. Together,
Black Boy and American Hunger constitute one of the great retellings of the American
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