"Generally speaking, Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America. They entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people. For the most part these artistic ambassadors were received as though they were French poodles who do clever tricks" (Blueprint for Negro Writing: The Role of Negro Writing...1403).
When Richard Wright penned these words, he embarked on two distinct, yet interrelated projects: first, the writing of "the past" to which he refers here was clearly an indictment of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance and their widespread dependency on white patrons. Second, Wright's call for a new theory of African American writing was germinating: it was a theory that envisioned the African American writer not as an individual determined to prove himself against the literary models of a white public, but to carve out his own aesthetic in representing lived experience. With these twin projects, Richard Wright instantiated himself as one of the preeminent thinkers and contributors to a changing role of the black author, and the emerging character of black writing.
Raised in desperate poverty in Natchez, Mississippi, Richard Wright was passed from relative to relative when his mother became ill. He spent a good portion of his boyhood with his grandmother and an aunt, whose deeply religious household left him hostile to spiritual life (Gates, et al 1399). In fact it was during these years that Wright's ambivalence toward the folk as the literary subject began to develop. He, like African American writers and scholars before him, felt a certain suspicion toward representations of folklife as bordering on minstrelsy.
Wright's novels were largely influenced by his interest in Marxist Communism: an ideology that sought to empower the proletariat. Wright further drew from the writing of Marcel Proust, Theodore Dreiser, and other writers of the Naturalist school. Naturalism, like Realism, endeavored to portray life in all its aspects with emphasis on verisimilitude. However, Naturalism went a step further to focus on the particularly brutal sides of living--particularly the harsh realities and "pathologies of life in an urban ghetto" (1400). "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" is one such sample of Wright's devotion to depicting--with focused determination--the horrors of the segregated South with brutal frankness. In so doing, Wright contributed to a type of early protest writing. In his much acclaimed novel, Native Son, Wright expands his focus to deliver a painstaking and troubling depiction of the realities faced by the African American male in a metropolitan setting. This novel in particular entered Wright into a sociological dialogue concerning social determinism--for which he acknowledged the Chicago School of Urban Sociology; and galvanized a literary genre known as Urban Realism.
Wright's literary (and sociological) study of the impact of society's structures upon the African American male, and his scathing criticism of racism in the U.S. garnered him the auspicious role of progenitor of the Black Arts Movement that arose during the 1960s (1401). His work, as well as his philosophies, supported Black Nationalism; and though he broke with the Communist Party in the 1940s, a Marxist attitude pervaded his literary production.
Additionally, Wright's work has been categorized in part as Modernist in terms of the ways the author depicted the workings of the mind,
