Word: webb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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RICHARD WRIGHT, by Constance Webb. Using previously unpublished material, Miss Webb, a close friend of the late Negro novelist, tracks Wright's career from poverty in Mississippi to fame and prestige in Paris...
RICHARD WRIGHT by Consfance Webb. 443 pages. Putnam...
...which Richard Wright was well qualified. He spent his first 19 years learning his place in Mississippi and Tennessee. For a boy with brains, talent and a white-hot ambition to be a writer, the inevitable conflicts were excruciating. Miss Webb, who was one of Wright's close white friends, gets most of them down, but she can scarcely improve on Wright's own well-known Black Boy (1945), a relentless autobiographical rendering of poverty, starvation, humiliation and yearning...
Biographer Webb, a former advertising copywriter and actress, is on fresher ground when she chronicles his years in the North. Much of the material is drawn from the last third of the Black Boy manuscript, which did not appear in the finished book. In Chicago, Wright worked at odd menial jobs and encountered the same fears and prejudices he had left at home. He worked nights as a postal clerk and spent his days reading and "filling endless pages with stream-of-consciousness Negro dialect, trying to depict the dwellers of the black belt as he felt and saw them...
Card Carrier. As the Depression deepened, so did Wright's belief that radical politics held the only promise for social and racial justice. In 1932, he joined the Chicago John Reed Club and, says Miss Webb, "committed himself wholeheartedly-morally, intellectually and artistically-in the fullest gesture of his life." Miss Webb is hesitant to say outright that Wright was cynically used by the American Communist Party to rally Negro support. Yet she makes it quite clear that, although Wright carried a party card, he was too preoccupied with his problems as an artist and his own writing career...