Richard Wright's Successful Failure: A New Look at Uncle Tom's Children

Abstract

IN THE RECENT controversy over the literary achievement of Richard Wright, the novelist's first book, Uncle Tom's Children (1938), has been generally ignored. James Baldwin, of course, centered his now famous Wright criticisms around Native Son; Baldwin does mention Uncle Tom's Children in his Alas, Poor Richard, but the reference is a passing one and implies that this book, like Native Son, lacks the stature of Black Boy.1 In their discussion of Wright in Dark Symphony, James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross state that when we consider Richard Wright's special contribution to American literature, we remember several of the stories [italics mine] in Uncle Tom's Children and Eight Men; and some of the writing of his later period -The Long Dream, Lawd Today, and Black Power.2 Besides relegating Wright's first full-length work to a relatively minor level of importance, this evaluation also suggests that the book lacks real unity. As will be argued, this implication is extremely shortsighted. Nevertheless, Wright criticism has centered around Native Son, Black Boy, and the existential overtones of The Outsider almost to the exclusion of any consideration of Uncle Tom's Children. Of course, Wright himself must bear the weight of responsibility for this evaluation of his first book; in his essay, How 'Bigger' Was Born published in 1940, the novelist himself labeled his first work a failure: