After the publication of his best-selling novel Native Son, in 1940, Richard Wright found himself at once a celebrated and polarizing figure. His outlook, some argued, embodied an unbearable pessimism about race in America, warping his characters into caricatures. Some critics—including two of Wright’s former protégés, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison—contended that Wright’s work, by focusing single-mindedly on the oppression and degradation of Black people by White people, risked tainting Black America with the very racism it was working to free itself from.

Wright was born into crippling poverty and the chokehold of Jim Crow in the South. His work reveals a man closely observing the actual conditions around him as he searches for understanding, belonging, and catharsis. In hindsight, much of Wright’s work, which included themes of police brutality, feels prescient.

Wright would not have cast himself as an eternal pessimist. “I urge my race to become strong through alliances, by joining in common cause with other oppressed groups,” he wrote in a letter to "The Atlantic," responding to a review of Native Son. Among the alliances he sought was with the Communist Party. It proved complicated. As he wrote in a 1944 article for The Atlantic—titled “I Tried to Be a Communist”—his enthusiastic discovery “that there did exist in this world an organized search for the truth of the lives of the oppressed and the isolated” gave way to a realization that ideology doesn’t transcend racism.

And he bristled at the suggestion by party members that he conform his craft to meet the party’s needs: “My writing was my way of seeing, my way of living, my way of feeling; and who could change his sight, his sense of direction, his senses?”