Michel Fabre

Chester B. Himes

Tomsson Black, political visionary, business genius, and underground revolutionary, plots to avenge injustice by instigating racial turmoil. The roots of racism extend far back into his ancestry, and persecution and suffering have affected many generations of his family. Tomsson's own misfortunes are the impetus for him to found a criminal underworld whose ultimate purpose is the overflow of white society. This novel, the history of Tomsson Black and an indictment of racism in America, ends in apocalypse. It is Chester Himes's ultimate statement about the destructive power of racism and his own personal fantasy of how the American Negro, through calculated acts of violence and martyrdom, could destroy the unequal system pervading American life. However, after reaching an ideological impasse, Himes, one of the angriest writers in the black protest movement, left this novel unfinished. After his death in Spain in 1984, a rumor persisted that he had left a final, unfinished Harlem story, in which he literally destroys both his Harlem backdrop and his heroes in a violent racial cataclysm. The manuscript, entitled Plan B, is that novel. It was edited and published in France, where it was widely hailed as an unfinished masterpiece by readers and critics alike. This new edition, appearing for the first time in the United States, includes an introduction by Michel Fabre (The Sorbonne) and Robert E. Skinner (Xavier University), who have prepared Plan B for publication.

A Novel

Plan B

Epistemologia della formazione

Joseph Benson

Craig Werner

Kenneth Kinnamon

Any future biographical work on Richard Wright will find this bibliography a necessity; academic or public libraries supporting a program of black culture will find it invaluable; and it belongs in any library supporting American literature studies. Richard Wright has truly been well served. Choice The most comprehensive bibliography ever compiled for an American writer, this book contains 13,117 annotated items pertaining to Richard Wright. It includes almost all published mentions of the author or his work in every language in which those mentions appear. Sources listed include books, articles, reviews, notes, news items, publishers' catalogs, promotional materials, book jackets, dissertations and theses, encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, handbooks and study guides, library reports, best seller charts, the Index Translationum, playbills and advertisements, editorials, radio transcripts, and published letters and interviews. The bibliography is arranged chronologically by year. Each entry includes bibliographical information, an annotation by the authors, and information about all reprintings, partial or full. The index is unusually complete and contains the titles of Wright's works, real and fictional characters in the works, entries relating to significant places and events in the author's life, important literary terminology, and much additional information.

Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933-1982

A Richard Wright Bibliography

The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright

Richard Wright, the Mississippi-born black writer, saw himself as "an outsider between two cultures," a man searching. In these twelve essays written over the last two decades Michel Fabre, Wright's biographer, follows Wright's search in an investigation of the novelist's life and career. Although the essays were not originally intended as a collection, their organization her underscores Wright's literary and intellectual development. The essays range in time from a bibliographical study of Wright's first scanty personal library to his interest at the end of his life in Negritude and African writing. Other essays probe his first use of the Gothic and his subsequent first efforts at "naturalistic" fiction, in which he moved away from the ideology of the American Communist Party, to which he belonged for some ten years after 1933, to more personal modes of self-expression. Also explored within these pieces are Wright's use of the psychological approach, his interest in the link between sex and racism, and his obsessive exploration of the unconscious determinants in so-called criminal behavior. One essay examines Wright's poetry from the days when he wrote ideological poems published in New Masses and other radical magazines, to his later composition of blues, to his final mastery of the Japanese poetic form of haiku. Included is an interview with Simone De Beauvoir, who discusses her friendship with Wright, and in an essay never before published, Fabre explores the relationship of Wright--"as much as soon of Mississippi as is William Faulkner"--not only to the South but to his illiterate sharecropper father and Wright's use of both as negative metaphors in his work. Fabre also delves into Wright's view of his past and his use of it in an ideological construction that asserts, in the best Afro-American literary tradition, the development of a Promethean will towards education and literacy. The final essays address Wright's career and intellectual development during the last sixteen years of his life, spent as an American expatriate in Paris. A final essay focuses on Wright's turn at the end of his life to nofiction and his introduction of African readers to the complexities of the racial situation in the United States and the aims of the Civil Rights Movement then taking place in the U.S.

The World of Richard Wright

Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980; 'The list of individuals profiled in this thoughtful, eye-opening study is a veritable who's who of black America literature...By discussing the effects of both world wars and the ideologies of the Harlem Renaissance, the French Negritude movement, and Black Power in Paris, Fabre enriches our understanding of black history, culture, and art on both sides of the Atlantic.'

Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980

From Harlem to Paris

Charles T. Davis

Charles Twitchell Davis

Richard Wright, a Primary Bibliography

This bibliography of Richard Wright's library and reading serves as a key to understanding the development, philosophies, and aesthetics of this great writer and provides accurate information for the study of intertextuality in his works. Richard Wright, born in Mississippi in 1908, was largely self-taught. His only formal schooling was high school. As he recounts in Black Boy, he used a white friend's library card at the Memphis Public Library, where blacks were not allowed. That books were almost "living companions" for Wright is easily understandable. Through books and, later, through relationships with writers, he broadened his perspectives, his understanding of society, and the very craft of writing. In the history of Richard Wright, perhaps more than with other writers, a knowledge of what he actually read, and of what authors he preferred, is essential in explaining his intellectual development. Michel Fabre, Wright's biographer and foremost Wright scholar, details the volumes in Wright's library and the facts of Wright's reading habits. This listing of books that formed and influenced him includes second-hand books he bought while living in extreme poverty in Chicago, some borrowed books never returned, books purchased in New York and Paris, books Wright deemed required reading for a growing novelist, gift books, and others in a comprehensive list on such subjects as contemporary American literature, classic European works, criminology, psychiatry, and social sciences. In compiling this listing Fabre goes beyond the actual contents of Wright's library, for he includes also titles drawn from references in Wright's works and from accounts of people who knew him and his reading habits. Included also is an appendix that collects for the first time reviews written by Wright, his prefaces, forewords, and blurbs. They show his appreciation of diverse genres and styles, although his ideological commitment remained the same. In them one sees Wright as an author ready to help younger writers, black and white, American and French.

Books and Writers

Richard Wright

Depuis les anneés 1830, quand les riches créoles de couleur de La Nouvelle-Orléans venaient étudier ou faire carrière à Paris, la France a représenteé pour les Noirs américains une terre de liberté. Arrivés sur les champs de bataille de la Grande Guerre avec le jazz dans leurs bagages, ils ont par la suite représenté une présence culturelle constante. Aux heures difficiles du maccarthysme, les expatriés se réunissaient dans les cafés du Quartier latin autour de Richard Wright, Chester Himes et William Gardner Smith tandis que James Baldwin cherchait son identité à Belleville Très écorné par la colonisation, puis par la guerre d'Algérie et la montée du racisme, le mythe de la France libérale et accueillante pour les écrivains et les artistes noirs américains subsiste encore aux anneées du Pouvoir noir. Il est perceptible à travers les impressions et les œuvres de contemporains dont de nombreuses citations enrichissent ce panorama. Dans une prose alerte et enthousiaste, cette chronique, pleine d'anecdotes révélatrices, offre des aperçus nuancés sur les rencontres entre cultures française, afro-américaine et africaine.

les écrivains noirs américains à Paris, 1830-1995

La rive noire

Regards sur la littérature noire américaine

de Harlem à la Seine

Explores the African American writer's literary odyssey and struggle for freedom from racism and materialism

Michel Fabre

Books

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