For some years, I have been trying to understand Richard Wright’s struggle to find and make meaning of Black life and living in a meaningless world that is grounded in white supremacy and anti-Black racism (Hayes, 1997, 2008, forthcoming). Initially influenced by political theorist Cedric Robinson’s critical discussion of Wright in his book, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983), I have approached Wright’s ideas from the standpoint of Black existential political philosophy (See Gordon, 1995, 1997, 2000; Yancy, 2008). Black existentialism is a branch of Africana philosophy, which focuses on the philosophical tendencies that arose out of the historical experience of the African Diaspora; that is to say, this perspective is a response to the often traumatic experience of being Black in the context of an anti-Black world. In my judgment, Wright’s existential quest made him the foremost Black writer to have exploded on the modern American literary scene in the period immediately following the Harlem Renaissance. And as a Black male, he was the essence of Black literary power. Richard Wright is a towering figure in twentieth-century Africana literary, philosophical, and political thought. Novelist of ideas, radical activist, and global intellectual, he posed a number of pressing questions that spanned many political milieux and traditional academic disciplines. As the author of both fictional and nonfictional works, he was quite simply one of America’s most influential writers. His attempts to extirpate the root motives that underlie Western civilization’s violent anti-Black racism and Black people’s struggle for meaning and liberation in an absurd world deeply influenced subsequent generations of