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February. /<WP - \e* \attonal HI -I( A XIO\!TOR
Richard Wright ••••••• (Continuedfrom page 18J
historical and philosophical—as well as
artistic perspective may be brought to bear
on all that a writer has to say. Thus, Rich
ard Wright was as much an avid reader as
he was a disciplined observer of the world
of which he wrote.
- -■ jit «
Without a tune-up this engine uses
SBOO worth of gasoline each year.
If your car is a glutton for gas,
a tune-up can pay for itself.
Most people don’t realize it, but it’s true.
In fact, the Department of Energy says that
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If you’re a typical driver, and consume
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more than one dollar).
And, for most drivers, that’s a lot more than
they d pay for a tune-up.
The point is, if your car is out of tune,
But most important of all—a writer must
come to know oneself. Writing was, in
Wright’s view, therapeutic; self-revealing;
akin to psychoanalysis. Os this crucial ex
perience of self-discovery he wrote: “If you
try it, you will find that at times sweat will
break out upon y0u.... You will find that
With a tune-up this engine uses
$720 worth of gasoline each year.
you’re paying for the cost of a tune-up
through your gas bills—whether you get it
or not. So why not get it, and end up with a
car that runs smoother and more efficiently
in the bargain?
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there are many things that you don’t want
to admit about yourself and others. As your
record shapes itself up, an awed wonder
haunts you. And yet there is no more excit
ing an adventure than to be honest in this
way. The clean strong feeling that sweeps
you when you’ve done it makes you know
ARCO 0
►
Atlantic Richfield Company
that.” (See Ebony, 11-45, pp. 26-30)
The Lse of Experience
Richard Wright’s Native Son was the first
novel by a black American to make the
best-seller lists. “The publication of Native
Son on March 1, 1940,” according to
Michel Fabre, “made Richard Wright one
of the great names among American novel
ists of the forties.” (Fabre, p. 178)
The road to his pinnacle had not been
easy. A fractured family life marked by
sickness, hunger and almost constant in
security was a long way removed from the
nation’s best-seller list. Moving to Chicago
from Mississippi, Richard Wright found
that city during the 1920’s and 1930’s to be
a dull, listless and icy version of the miser
able life with which he had been acquainted ■
in the South. i
But Richard Wright absorbed each ex
perience which he encountered, extracting ■
from each moment of life its inner meaning,
so that later it might be used—re-told and
re-lived—for some creative or redeeming
purpose. It was thus that he moved through
communist circles in the 1930’s— a standard
route for the sake of some semblance of
sanity and acceptance for black writers of
that time —finding whatever leverages and
satisfactions which those associations might
bring, and then moving during the years of
World War II to a more conservative place
outside of the left wing circles. He was in
the forefront of building patriotic fervor.
Every experience Wright thus saw and
used for whatever good—or positive or ,
negative insight—which it might contain.
That Black America came to value him
most greatly was evident in Wright’s having
been awarded the NAACP’s highest honor,
its Spingarn Medal.
Upon receiving the Spingarn Medal, he
replied significantly:
“It is with a deep sense of responsibility
that I accept the Spingarn Medal. I accept it
in the name of the stalwart, enduring mil
lions of Negroes whose fate and destiny 1
have sought to depict in terms of scene and
narrative in imaginative fiction. It cannot
be otherwise, for they are my people, and
my writing—which is my life and which
carries my convictions—attempts to mirror
their struggle for freedom during these
troubled days.
“To be more explicit, I accept this award
in the name of my father, a sharecropper on
a Mississippi plantation, and in the name of
my mother, who sacrificed her health on
numerous underpaid jobs, and in the name
of millions like them, whose hope for peace
and security reflects the aspirations of the
common people everywhere during this
period of.. .cataclysmic social change.”
(Letter to the Spingarn Committee, 7-41)
I
Enduring Legacy
Richard Wright died prematurely at the
age of 52. His ideas have been adopted and
advanced by many others, and there may be I
few major initiatives for black self-suffi-