Eat me.... All over town. Eat me at the King of
Southern Fried Chicken!” (228)—Lester ends up
castrated and alone at the end of the novel.
Perhaps one of the reasons (if not the central
reason) The Wig did not succeed is its experimen-
tal form—its surrealistic bends, dips, and turns.
Wright tells John O’Brien, “The Wig is not a plot-
ted novel; it’s in episodes and you might think
of it in relation to vaudeville” (252). The novel
received lukewarm reviews; however, some crit-
ics praised it highly. ISHMAEL REED acknowledges
being influenced by Wright’s experimental fiction.
The Wig is, he argued “one of the most underrated
novels” written in the 20th century (Weixlmann,
1984, 291). Ironically, perhaps what caused re-
viewers to ignore The Wig is the very quality of the
novel and the role Wright played in helping shape
and direct African-American fiction at mid-20th
century. Joe Weixlmann claims as much when he
notes that Wright, as a member of the avant-garde,
will be “remembered as an innovator in breaking
with traditional fictional modes during the 1960s”
(1997, 791–792).
Written during his widespread meanderings,
Wright’s final work, Absolutely Nothing to Get
Alarmed About, a collection of his nonfictional
pieces, sometimes celebrated for its journalistic
and novelistic quality, was similarly received with
mixed reviews. HarperPerennial published it as
part of Wright’s New York trilogy, together with
The Messenger and The Wig, in 1999. Like his major
characters, Wright has lived a life of meandering
about from the United States to Mexico.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hogue, Lawrence. The African American Male, Writ-
ing and Difference. Albany: State University of
New York, Press, 2003.
O’Brien, John, ed. “Charles Wright.” In Interviews
with Black Writers, 245–257. New York: Liveright,
1973.
Weixlmann, Joe. “Charles Stevenson Wright.” In Dic-
tionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 33: Afro-Ameri-
can Fiction Writers after 1955, edited by Thadious
M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 288–293. Detroit:
Gale Research Company, 1984.
———. “Charles Wright.” In The Oxford Companion
to African American Literature, edited by William
L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier
Harris, 791–792. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997.
Wright, Charles. Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed
About. In Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About:
The Complete Novels of Charles Wright, 255–387.
New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.
———. The Messenger. In Absolutely Nothing to Get
Alarmed About: The Complete Novels of Charles
Wright, 1–131. New York: Harper Perennial,
1999.
———. The Wig. In Absolutely Nothing to Get
Alarmed About: The Complete Novels of Charles
Wright, 133–254. New York: Harper Perennial,
1999.
Wilfred D. SamuelsWright, Jay (1934– )
Poet and dramatist Jay Wright was born in Albu-
querque, New Mexico, to Leona Daily, a Virgin-
ian of African and Native American ancestry, and
Mercer Murphy Wright (a.k.a. George Murphy), a
native New Mexican of Irish, Cherokee, and Afri-
can-American descent. Living mostly with foster
parents in his younger years, Wright absorbed the
Southwest’s various cultures. As an adolescent, he
moved with his birth father to San Pedro, Califor-
nia. While still in high school and for a short while
after graduating in 1953, Wright played baseball in
the minor leagues of Arizona, Texas, and Califor-
nia. While doing a stint in the U.S. Army (1954–
57) and stationed in Germany, Wright traveled
throughout Europe.
Wright earned a bachelor’s degree in compara-
tive literature, in 1961, from the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley. Additionally, he won a Rockefeller
Brothers Theological Fellowship, briefly attended
New York’s Union Theological Seminary, and, in
1962, began graduate study in comparative litera-
ture at Rutgers. He left graduate school in 1964 to
teach medieval history and English in Guadala-
jara, Mexico, at the Butler Institute. Returning to564 Wright, Jay