The Art Of Richard Wright Edward Margolies

Reading Margolies on Wright

Edward Margolies' work on Richard Wright is one of those critical studies that actually holds up twenty years later, which isn't saying much for literary criticism. I read it back in the late nineties when I was trying to figure out how to teach Native Son without making every white student in the room defensive. The book got me past the standard readings that treat Wright as just a angry protest writer, which is the whole mistake people keep making. Margolies' central argument is straightforward but easy to miss if you skim. He tracks how Wright's technique evolved from the naturalist impulse in Uncle Tom's Children through the more complex psychological territory of The Outsider novels. Most people stop at Black Boy and Native Son and assume that's all Wright did. That's wrong. The shift happens gradually, and Margolies documents it chapter by chapter without getting precious about it. I remember hitting a wall trying to explain why Right Man Is Up There doesn't fit the usual Wright template. A student asked me if it was even a story, and I didn't have a good answer at the time. Margolies comes back to this story repeatedly when he's talking about Wright's struggle with lyrical passages. He argues that Wright's real gift was rhythm, not symbolism, and that the famous "lyrical" stretches in Native Son are actually the moments Wright feels most uncomfortable. That flipped how I approached the text entirely.

One practical thing nobody tells you about using Margolies in a syllabus: he's generous with quotes, which makes him useful, but he also summarizes scenes extensively. If you're citing him on plot points, go back to the primary text. I learned that the hard way when a grad student caught me attributing a detail to Margolies that turned out to be his interpretation, not Wright's actual scene. Margolies was working from a memory of the text, and he sometimes blurs the line between what Wright wrote and what he thinks Wright meant. Check everything. The downside of the book is that it was written in 1968, right at the height of New Critical formalism, and you can feel that pressure. Margolies occasionally treats Wright's political commitments as background noise rather than as structural elements of the work. If you read him alongside Ralph Ellison's reviews or later scholarship from Houston Baker, you get a more complete picture. Margolies is a starting point, not a destination. There's also the issue of race in the critical voice itself. Margolies writes with a kind of earnest seriousness that reads differently now. He respects Wright enormously, and that respect sometimes turns into him defending Wright against charges that most contemporary scholars aren't even making. If you're looking for a book that challenges Wright's limitations, this isn't it. But if you want to understand the craft, the sentence-level decisions, the way Wright builds a scene, Margolies pays attention to the mechanics in a way that younger critics often skip over.

I keep returning to the chapter on the automatic writing section in Native Son. Margolies reads it as genuine confusion rather than failed symbolism, and he's right about that. Bigger's flight through the streets isn't meant to be decoded, it's meant to simulate disorientation. That passage has tripped up students for decades because they think they're supposed to find meaning in it. Margolies saves you from that trap if you let him. The book is available through most academic publishers and occasionally shows up on the used market if you hunt for it. Marginalia from previous readers tends to be useful since a lot of the early copies were classroom texts. I found someone's handwritten notes comparing Wright's imagery to Eliot's that ended up being more accurate than Margolies' own reading on a few passages. If you're teaching Wright, start with Margolies on technique before moving to the political criticism. The craft comes first, and once students see how Wright actually builds a paragraph, the politics stops feeling like a lecture and starts feeling like a choice. That's when the class actually wakes up.