The New Yorker:

By Claudia Roth Pierpont
February 10, 1997 

In the spring of 1938, Zora Neale Hurston informed readers of the Saturday Review of Literature that Mr. Richard Wright’s first published book, “Uncle Tom’s Children,” was made up of four novellas set in a Dismal Swamp of race hatred, in which not a single act of understanding or sympathy occurred, and in which the white man was generally shot dead. “There is lavish killing here,” she wrote, “perhaps enough to satisfy all male black readers.” Hurston, who had swept onto the Harlem scene a decade before, was one of the very few black women in a position to write for the pallidly conventional Saturday Review. Wright, the troubling newcomer, had already challenged her authority to speak for their race. Reviewing Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in the New Masses the previous fall, he had dismissed her prose for its “facile sensuality”—a problem in Negro writing that he traced to the first black American female to earn literary fame, the slave Phillis Wheatley. Worse, he accused Hurston of cynically perpetuating a minstrel tradition meant to make white audiences laugh. It says something about the social complexity of the next few years that it was Wright who became a Book-of-the-Month Club favorite, while Hurston’s work went out of print and she nearly starved. For the first time in America, a substantial white audience preferred to be shot at.

Black anger had come out of hiding, out of the ruins of the Harlem Renaissance and its splendid illusions of justice willingly offered up to art. That famed outpouring of novels and poems and plays of the twenties, anxiously demonstrating the Negro’s humanity and cultural citizenship, counted for nothing against the bludgeoning facts of the Depression, the Scottsboro trials, and the first-ever riot in Harlem itself, in 1935. The advent of Richard Wright was a political event as much as a literary one. In American fiction, after all, there was nothing new in the image of the black man as an inarticulate savage for whom rape and murder were a nearly inevitable means of expression. Southern literature was filled with Negro portraits not so different from that of Bigger Thomas, the hero of Wright’s 1940 bombshell, “Native Son.” In the making of a revolution, all that had shifted was the author’s color and the blame.

Go to link