The Vanguard of Modernity: Richard Wright's The Outsider

Abstract

When Richard Wright became nationally known through publication of Native Son in 1940, he had already assumed a central place in radical political culture of international communist movement.1 Moreover Native Son and Black Boy influenced existentialist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, who shared Wright's emphasis on alienated consciousness.2 During 1940s Wright's public affiliations continued to move away from American scene that had formed context for his early writing. He resigned from Communist Party in 1944, citing its control of his political and aesthetic decisions; he formed connections with leaders of PanAfrican movement, including C. L. R. James and George Padmore;3 and in 1946, he moved his family from New York to Paris to escape American racism and intrusion by FBI.4 From his exile in France, Wright produced an ambitious analysis of modern West in a series of works published between 1953 and 1958: The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), Pagan Spain (1957), White Man, Listen! (1957), and The Long Dream (1958). Together they offer a wide-ranging analysis of Europe's colonial adventure and its impact on European and non-European peoples alike, integrating philosophical and psychological factors with political, economic, and cultural ones. The Outsider, with its existentialist concerns, rejection of realism, and attacks on Communist Party leaders and methods, marks Wright's transition toward a postwar stance of internationalism, nonalignment, and anticolonial analysis of modern West. Wright described his exile as more than a geographical change. It was a break with my former attitudes as a Negro and a Communist. ... I was trying to grapple with big problem problem and meaning of Western civilization as a whole and relation of Negroes and other minority groups to it.5 The Outsider examines philosophical and psychological forms of alienation shaping quintessentially modern agent, mob. During early cold war years, concept of the mob suggested