Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.
In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.
Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.
He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.
W. H. Auden was a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.
Are You There?
W.H. Auden
Each lover has some theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:
Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.
Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
He cannot join his image in the lake
So long as he assumes he is alone.
The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,
Are always up to mischief, though, and take
The universe for granted as their own.
The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
To think of love as a subjective fake;
The more they love, the more they feel alone.
Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
Why every lover has a wish to make
Some kind of otherness his own:
Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.
Funeral Blues
by: W. H. Auden
William Bliss Carman, the "Poet Laureate of Canada," was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on April 15, 1861. Son of William and Sophia, Bliss Carman was widely known in Canada and the United States. His father was an affluent Supreme Court Judge, thus giving Bliss a chance for a good solid educational background.
He graduated from the Collegiate School in Fredericton, and received the following degrees from the University of New Brunswick: B.A. 1881; M.A. 1884; and L.L.D. in 1906. When he left the University of New Brunswick he went to Edinburgh University and from 1883 to 1886, he studied law and taught school. Two more years were spent in study of Harvard.
Between the years 1896 to 1899, Carman travelled extensively, walking through England, spending some time in Paris and making a trip to the Bahamas. During this time, Carman met Dr. and Mrs. Morris Lee King who became his patrons. They maintained a studio for him at their house in New Caanan, Connecticut. He moved there in 1908 and launched out on several long lecture tours throughout Canada and the United States.
Described by many as a person with graceful bearing, he was about six-feet-two in height, slender, with erect posture. He walked with a long, smooth stride in his flat, long, heelless shoes, with the silence and ease of a panther.
His clothes, the Carman trade mark, consisted of a corduroy suit, flowing tie, and a broad-trimmed western hat that he had started wearing years before in California to protect his eyes from the sun.
Carman's writings were all of nature and the philosophy of the outdoors - the flowers, the trees and creeks and rivers. He even tried his hand at commercial writing, journalism and once responded to an appeal from a friend to write copy for an account dealing with rare fabrics and beautiful hand-made articles.
He died suddenly at New Caanan, Connecticut, U.S. on June 8, 1929. As a final tribute to him, the Government of New Brunswick and University of New Brunswick brought his ashes home and placed them in a spot overlooking his beloved river, the Saint John.
Carman wrote hundreds of poems about nature and human's kinship with it. These were published in magazines, and gave pleasure to thousands of readers. One example is a poem called Vestegia in which Carman writes:
I took a day to search for God.
And found him not. But as I walked
By rocky ledge, through
Just where one scarlet lily flamed,
I saw his footprint in the sod.
His most famous book of poems is called Low Tide on Grand Pré (1893). In his lifetime, William Bliss Carman was considered the best poet in Canada. He enjoyed the highest reputation in the United States and Great Britain ever held by a Canadian poet.
Biographical Information:
William Stanley Braithwaite / Poet, Literary Critic, Editor, & Anthologist (1878 - 1962)
Biography: Poet, literary critic, editor, and anthologist, William Stanley Braithwaite was a distinguished fellow of American letters. Braithwaite was born in Boston and largely educated at home. His father was a native of British Guiana and his light-skinned mother was the daughter of a mulatto ex-slave. His passion for literature was fostered in the years he spent as an apprentice for the publisher, Ginn & Company. Braithwaite published his first volume of poetry, Lyrics of Life and Love, in 1904, followed four years later by The House of Falling Leaves. He was the literary editor of the Boston Evening Transcript between 1908 and 1929, and achieved a national reputation as the editor of the annual Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year Book of American Poetry, published from 1913 to 1939. His criticism and poetry also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The North American Review, and Scribner's Magazine. In addition to several anthologies of British literature, other works by Braithwaite include Our Essayists and Critics of Today; A Fragment Wrenched from the Life of Titus Jabson (1924), a novel; Frost on the Green Leaf (1928) , a collection of short stories; Selected Poems (1948); and an autobiography, The House Under Arcturus (1941).
In 1981 Braithwaite became the fourth recipient of the Spingarn Medal, endowed by Joel E. Spingarn, the board chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., and a awarded annually to an African-American for outstanding achievement. In that same year, he received honorary degrees from Atlanta University and Talledega College. He was a professor of literature at Atlanta University from 1935 until 1945.
Historian Jervis Anderson refers to Braithwaite as "a leader of the older black literary generation," a "patriarch" who once advised Claude McKay, than an emerging young writer of the Harlem Renaissance, to write in a manner that would not disclose his racial identity. However, despite such differences of opinion between the old and new generations of African-American writers, Braithwaite did much to encourage the literary movement of the 1920s.
The Braithwaite family took up residence at 409 Edgecombe Avenue in 1941; following Braithwaite's death, his widow and children remained at 409.
Biographical Information:
Gene Zeiger lives in Shelburne, Massachusetts, where she has lead writing and poetry workshops for the last 18 years. Her collections of poetry include "Sudden Dancing" and "Leaving Egypt," She has published a memoir, "How I Found Her: A Mother's Dying and A Daughter's Life".
Biographical Information:
Henry D(avid) Thoreau (1817-1862)
American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher, best-known for his autobiographical story of life in the woods, WALDEN (1854). Thoreau became one of the leading personalities in New England Transcendentalism. He wrote tirelessly but earned from his books and journalism little. Thoreau's CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (1849) influenced Gandhi in his passive resistance campaigns,Martin Luther King, Jr., and at one time the politics of the British Labour Party.
"For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, through I never received one cent for it." (Journal, February 22, 1845-1847 - no year in Thoreau's dateline)
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, which was center of his life, although he spent several years in his childhood in the neighboring towns and elsewhere in his adulthood. In 1835 Thoreau contracted tuberculosis and suffered from recurring bouts throughout his life. However, a few years later Emerson described Thoreauas a "strong healthy youthm fresh from college". He had an out-of doors complexion, and he was often seen walking around his home town. Thoreau studied at Concord Academy (1828-33), and at Harvard University, graduating in 1837. He was teacher in Canton, Massachusetts (1835-36), and at Center School (1837), resigning after two weeks - he first refused to continue the tradition of daily canings and then beat six students to protest against corporal punishment.
From 1837-38 Thoreau worked in his father's pencil factory, and returning to the factory in 1844 and 1849-50. With his elder brother John he opened a school in Concord. Thoreau taught there in 1838-41 until his John Thoreau became fatally ill. From 1848 he was a regular lecturer at Concord Lyceym. He also worked as a land surveyor.
A decisive turning point in Thoreau's life came when he met Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was a member of Emerson household from 1841 to 1843, earning his living as a handyman. In 1843 he was a tutor to William Emerson's sons in Staten Island, New York, and in 1847-48 he again lived in Emerson's house.
In 1845 Thoreau built a home on the shores of Walden Point for twenty-eight dollars. His observations and speculations Thoreau recorded in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS (1849). The account was based on a trip he took with John Thoreau in 1839.
His first book sold poorly and Thoreau remarked, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." Thoreau's most famous essay, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (1849), was a result of a overnight visit in 1846 in a jail, where he ended after refusing to pay his taxes in protest against the Mexican War and the extension of slavery. Later Thoreau lectured and wrote about the evils of slavery and helped fleeing slaves. In his famous statement, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," he crystallized his idea to be the one who has the courage to live, to stand against the trends of his own time.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods described a two-year period in Thoreau's life from March 1845 to September 1847. From the Fourth of July, the author retired from the town to live alone at Walden Pond. Much of Walden's material was derived from his journals and contains such pieces as 'Reading' and 'The Pond in the Winter.' "We are a race of titmen, and soar but a little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper," Thoreau wrote in 'Reading in Walden.' Other famous sections involve Thoreau's visits with a Canadian woodcutter and with an Irish family, a trip to Concord, and a description of his bean field. Although Walden has become an inspiration to all idealists who want to escape civilization, Thoreau was a practical person and took with him seed, lumber, clothes, nails, and other devices to survive - and his friends helped him to put the roof on his hut.
"We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my own townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects."
Although Thoreau never earned a living by his writings, his works fill 20 volumes. Among his many correspondence friends was H.G.O. Blake, once a Unitarian minister and later attached to the Transcendentalist, whom he wrote in December 1856: "I am grateful for what I am & have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contended one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existance." Aware that he was dying of tuberculosis, Thoreau cut short his travels and returned to Concord. There prepared some of his journals for publication. Thoreau died at Concord on May 6, 1862. His letters were edited by his friend Emerson and published posthumously in 1865. POEMS OF NATURE appeared in 1895 and COLLECTED POEMS in 1943. Thoreau's collection of journals was published in 1906 in 14 volumes.
Light-winged Smoke! Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowly form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
Thoreau's primary genre was essay. His fascination with the natural surroundings is reflected in many of his writings.
Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most important women poets writing in nineteenth-century England, was born in London December 5, 1830, to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. Although her fundamentally religious temperament was closer to her mother's, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.
Judging from somewhat idealized sketches made by her brother Dante, Christina as a teenager seems to have been quite attractive if not beautiful. In 1848 she became engaged to James Collinson, one of the minor Pre-Raphaelite brethren, but the engagement ended after he reverted to Roman Catholicism.
When Professor Rossetti's failing health and eyesight forced him into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother attempted to support the family by starting a day school, but had to give it up after a year or so. Thereafter she led a very retiring life, interrupted by a recurring illness which was sometimes diagnosed as angina and sometimes tuberculosis. From the early '60s on she was in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.
All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.
After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer December 29, 1894.
Richard (Nathaniel) Wright (1908-1960)
American short story writer and novelist, whose best known work, NATIVE SON, appeared in 1940. The book immediately established Wright as an important author and a spokesman on conditions facing African-Americans. It gained a large multiracial readership and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Wright's works drew on the poverty and segregation of his childhood in the South and early adulthood in Chicago.
"And, curiously, he felt that he was something, somebody, precisely and simply because of that cold threat of death. The terror of the white world had left no doubt in him about his worth; in fact, that white world had guaranteed his worth in the most brutal and dramatic manner. Most surely he was was something, in the eyes of the white world, or it would not have threatened him as it had. That white world, then, threatened as much as it beckoned. Though he did not know it, he was fatally in love with that white world, in love in a way that could never be cured. That white world's attempt to curb him dangerously and irresponsibly claimed him for its own." (from The Long Dream, 1958)
Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His grandparents had been slaves and his father, Nathaniel, who was an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, left home when Richard was six. Wright grew up in poverty, staying often at homes of relatives. His mother, Ella Wilson, was a schoolteacher; she moved with her family to Memphis, where she found employment as a cook. In 1915-16 Wright attended school for a few months, but his mother's illness forced him to leave. He attended school sporadically, lived in Arkansas with his aunt Maggie and uncle Silas, who was murdered, in Mississippi. In his childhood Wright was often beaten. However, he continued to teach himself, secretly borrowing books from the whites-only library in Memphis. "My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety," he later wrote in his autobiography BLACK BOY (1945).
Wright worked at various jobs, among others as a newspaper delivery boy and as an assistant to an insurance agent. His spare-time jobs enabled Wright to buy schoolbooks, pulp magazines, and dime novels, all of which he read avidly. At the age of fifteen, he wrote his first story, 'The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre'. It was published in Southern Register, a local black newspaper. Wright attended junior high school in Jackson, Mississippi, and graduated in 1925. From 1925 to 1927 Wright lived in Memphis, where he worked for an optical company.
During these years he read widely and decided to become a writer. Tired of segregation law, he moved to Chicago, hoping that life would be better there. He worked as a post office clerk, at that time the only place educated blacks could find work. During the Great Depression he hold several other jobs. Wright was also given the opportunity to write through the Federal Writers' Project. By the time he moved to New York City, he had written most of the novel LAWD TODAY, which was published posthumously in 1963. It centered around the life of Jake Jackson, a violent man from Chicago, who has not much hope in his mean environment. Social environment also played central role in Native Son, a view that was advocated especially leftist writers.
In 1932 Wright joined the Communist Party and was an executive secretary of the local John Reed Club of leftist writers and authors of Chicago. He wrote poetry for such journals as Left Front, Midland Left, Anvil, International Literature, Partisan Review, and New Masses. 'Big Boy Leaves Home', telling about the shocking end of the childhood of a young black boy, was first published in The New Caravan and greeted as the best piece in the anthology. In 1937 Wright moved to New York City, becoming editor of Daily Worke , and a later vice president of the League for American Writers. In 1938 Wright published UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN, a collection of stories of Southern racism, which was reissued in expanded form two years later. The story 'Fire and Cloud' was given the O. Henry Memorial award in 1938. Uncle Tom's Children helped Wright to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to devote his full time to writing.
Wright was named in the late 1930s to the literature editorial board of New Masses, and was denounced by the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities investigating the Federal Writers' Project. In 1940 Wright's Native Son became an instant best-seller. In some bookstores stock was sold out within hours; the novel sold 215,000 copies in the first three weeks. Many white Americans saw Bigger Thomas, the central character, as a symbol of the entire black community, and Wright later stated that "there are meanings in my books of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the paper." Wright used in the book a 1938 criminal case involving a black youth, Robert Nixon, who killed a white woman.
For the most part, the book was rendered in the present. Wright was an avid filmgoer and he explained that "I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger's story was happening now, like play upon a stage or a movie..." In the first film version, directed by Pierre Chenal, and adapted by Chenal and Wright, the author himself acted the role of Bigger Thomas. Wright spent three years on the project. The film was a disaster. The 1986 version was directed by Jerrold Freedman and adapted by Richard Wesley. Oprah Winfrey was in the role of Bigger's mother. "The second adaptation even goes so far as to eliminate Bigger's murder of Bessie, in order to reinforce the idea that Bigger is a mild-mannered victim, thus robbing the story of any controversy, and dialectic, and any philosophical significance. It also robs the story of the complexities of gender relations between black men and black women that are touched upon by Wright." (from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, 1999)
The protagonist of Native Son is a young black man in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who lives in a one-room apartment in Chicago's South Side Black Belt, with his mother, his young sister, Vera, and younger brother, Buddy. He is hired by a wealthy family named Dalton as their chauffeur. Mr. Dalton gives money for social welfare, but at the same time owns the rat-infested building in which Bigger lives. The rhythms of Bigger's life are "indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger - like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force." The family's free-thinking daughter Mary befriends him - with her he visits Communist headquarters, where she meets her boyfriend Jan Erlone. Mary has had too much drink. Bigger carries Mary back to her room. When her blind mother enters the room, he accidentally smothers her. In panic, he burns the body in the basement and attempt to implicate Jan. Mary's bones are discovered and Bigger also kills his own girlfriend, Bessie, to cover his tracks. He is captured and in the jail Bigger feels for the first time a sense of freedom: "Seems sort of natural-like, me being here facing that death chair. Now I come to think of it, it seems like something like this just had to be." He is then condemned to death and faces his destiny unrepentantly, affirming that 'what I killed for, I am!' Yet in prison he also comes to terms with the need for a common brotherhood. The last third of the book is largely a speech given by Boris A. Max, a party attorney, in Bigger's defense at his trial. Wright clearly used Max to convey his own Marxist assessment of the racial situation in the United States. The speech is also based on Clarence Darrow's defense of Leopold and Loeb. Wright's leftist friends were troubled because the Wright did not view Bigger's fate from an exploited worker's perspective. During the 1950s, the widespread fear of communism incited by the Cold War and McCarthyism led to the diminished popularity of Native Son. The sexually explicit scenes were removed from the Book-of-the-Month Club publication and Thomas did not show such obvious interest in the white character, Mary Dalton.
After his breakthrough as a writer, Wright collaborated with Paul Green on a stage adaptation of the book, which was directed by Orson Welles and run successfully on Broadway in 1941-43. After his marriage with Rose Dhima Meadman ended, a white dancer, Wright married in 1941 Ellen Poplar, a daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants and a fellow leftist. They had two daughters. The autobiographical Black Boy received good reviews. The book was set in the 1920s. It begins as the narrator accidentally burns his house down. Readers learn how he became a drunkard in his sixth year, and how begging drinks became his obsession. His mother and grandmother beat him, so hard sometimes that he lost consciousness. He was also beaten by his aunt in a Seventh-day Adventist school, where she was a teacher.
In 1944 Wright left Communist Party. He spent the summer of 1945 as an artist-in-residence at the Bread Loaf School for writers in Middlebury, Vermont, and then went to France with his wife and 4-year-old daughter. Wright met among others Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Léopold Senghor. He returned to the United States only briefly and settled in Paris, where he associated with existentialists and such American writers as James Baldwin. Wright helped Baldwin to win a prestigious literary fellowship, and Baldwin repaid him four years later by criticizing the tactics of Native Son in his career-launching essay 'Everybody's Protest Novel'.
In 1949 Wright joined George Plimpton and others in founding the Paris Review. He acted in the film based on the novel Native Son - the American release was not successful and the film was banned in several cities. Wright's existentialist novel THE OUTSIDER (1952), depicting a black intellectual's search for identity, received mixed reviews. It was praised mostly in Europe. In Paris Wright was not treated like in the American South, but he gradually lost touch with his inspiration, or "the rhythms of his life".
During his years in France, Wright spent much of his time supporting nationalist movements in Africa. In 1953 he travelled in Africa, gathering material for BLACK POWER (1954), and witnessing the rise of the Pan-African movement. Among his other works in the 1950s were SAVAGE HOLIDAY (1954), about a white man caught in a web of violence, THE COLOR CURTAIN (1956), about Asia, PAGAN SPAIN (1957), a travel book of a Catholic country full of contradictions, and WHITE MAN, LISTEN! (1958), a collection of lectures on racial injustice. Wright's last short story, 'Big Black Good Man', which originally was published in Esquire and was collected in EIGHT MEN (1961), was set in Copenhangen and dealt with prejudices. THE LONG DREAM (1958), a novel set in Mississippi, had a poor reception. Its sequel, Island of Hallucination, set in Paris, was not published. "Everything in the book happened, but I've twisted characters so that people won't recognise them," said Wright to his agent. AMERICAN HUNGER, a sequel to Black Boy, appeared in 1977.
Wright distanced in the last years of his life from his associates. He suffered from poor health and financial difficulties and grew suspicious about the activities of CIA in Paris - in which he was right. Wright's plans to move to London were rejected by the British officials. In 1959 he began composing haiku, producing almost four thousand of them. Wright died nearly penniless at the age of fifty-two in Paris, on November 28, 1960. At his request, his body was cremated and his ashes mixed with the ashes of a copy of Black Boy. Wright's daughter Julia has claimed that his father was murdered. Upon his death, Wright left behind an unfinished book on French West Africa. His travel writings, edited by Virginia Whatley Smith, appeared in 2001.
For further reading: Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955); Richard Wright by Robert Bone (1969); Richard Wright's Native Son by Richard Abcarian (1970); Richard Wright by David Bakish (1973); by Robert Felgar (1980); Critical Essays on Richard Wright, ed. by Yashinobu Hakutani (1982); Richard Wright: A Primary Biography by C.T. Davis and M. Fabre (1982); Richard Wright by Addison Gayle (1983); The World of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre (1985); Richard Wright's Art of Tragedy by J.A. Joyce (1986); Richard Wright's Native Son, ed. by H. Bloom (1988); Richard Wright's Black Boy, ed. by H. Bloom (1988), ed. by K. Kinnamon (1990) Voice of a Native Son by E. Miller (1990); 'Richard Wright: Native Son and Novelist', in Great Black Writers by Steven Otfinoski (1994); The Critical Response to Richar Wright, ed by Robert J. Butler (1995); Richard Wright and Racial Discourse by Yashinobu Hakutani (1996); Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazel Rowley (2001) - NOTE: Wright's Native Son was main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1949. It took nearly 30 year before the next novel by a black author became a main selection. The book was Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon - SEE ALSO OTHER AMERICAN WRITERS IN PARIS: Chester Himes, James Baldwin
Selected works:
UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN, 1938
NATIVE SON, 1940 - Amerian poika - a low-budget Argentine film version in 1951, dir. by Pierre Chenal, Wright acted the role of Bigger Thomas; film 1986, dir. by Jerrold Freedman, starring Victor Love, Carroll Baker, Akousuwa Busia, Matt Dillon, Oprah Winfrey, Geraldine Page
HOW BIGGER WAS BORN, 1940
TWELVE MILLION BLACK VOICES, 1941
THENEGRO ANDPARKWAY COMMUNITY HOUSE, 1941
play: NATIVE SON, 1941 (with P. Green, rev. ed. 1980)
THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND, 1942-44
BLACK BOY, 1945 - Musta poika
THE GOD THAT FAILED, 1950
screenplay: NATIVE SON, 1951
THE OUTSIDER, 1953 - Pikku jumalat
SAVAGE HOLIDAY, 1954
BLACK POWER, 1954
BANDOENG:1.500.000.000 HOMMES, 1955 - The Color Curtain: The Report on the Bandung Conference
THE COLOR CURTAIN, 1956
PAGAN SPAIN, 1957 (a new edition in 2002 by University Press of Mississippi, with an introductory essay by Faith Berry)
WHITE MAN, LISTEN!, 1957
THE LONG DREAM, 1958 - Pitkä uni
DADDY GOODNESS, 1959 (prod., adapted from Louis Sapin's Papa Bon Dieu)
EIGHT MEN, 1961 - Kahdeksan miestä
ed.: QUINTET, 1961
LAWD TODAY, 1963
LETTERS TO JOE C. BROWN, 1968
DADDY GOODNESS, 1968 (an adaptation of a play by Louis Sapin)
THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND, 1971
WHAT THE NEGRO WANTS, 1972
FARTHING FORTUNES, 1976
AMERICAN HUNGER, 1977
RICHARD WRIGHT READER, 1978
THE LIFE AND WORK OR RICHARD WRIGHT, 1979 (ed. by David Ray and M. Farnsworth)
NEW ESSAYS ON NATIVE SON, 1990 (ed. by Keneth Kinnamon)
selection: LAWD TODAY!, 1991
selection: LATER WORKS, 1991
complete text of NATIVE SON, 1991
complete text: BLACK BOY (AMERICAN HUNGER), 1991
RICHARD WRIGHT'S TRAVEL WRITINGS, 2001 (ed. by Virginia Whatley Smith)
Williams was born in Newburgh, New York. His older brother is actor Michael K. Williams. After graduating from Morehouse College with a B.A. in philosophy, Williams moved to New York City to earn a Master's Degree at New York University in acting. Here he found himself at the center of the New York cafe poetry scene.
By 1995 he had become a talented open mic poet and in 1996 he won the title of Nuyorican Poets Cafe's Grand Slam Champion. Fame on the spoken-word circuit led him to the lead role in the 1998 feature film Slam, which won both the Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize and the Cannes Camera D'Or, introducing Williams to international audiences.
Williams was at this time breaking into music. He had performed with such artists as The Fugees,Christian Alvarez, Blackalicious, Erykah Badu, KRS-One, Zack De La Rocha, De La Soul, and DJ Krust, as well as legendary poets Allen Ginsberg and Sonia Sanchez. After releasing a string of EPs, in 2001 he released the much-hyped Amethyst Rock Star with producer Rick Rubin and in September 2004 his self-titled album to much acclaim. He played several shows supporting Nine Inch Nails on their European tour in summer 2005, and has also supported The Mars Volta. Williams was also invited to the Lollapalooza music festival in Summer 2005. The Chicago stage allowed Williams to attract a wider audience. He also supported NIN on their 2006 North American tour, during which he announced that Trent Reznor would co-produce his next album.
As a writer, Williams has been published in The New York Times, Esquire, Bomb Magazine and African Voices, as well as having released four collections of poetry. He has toured and lectured across the world, appearing at many universities and colleges. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
According to a recent post on nin.com, Saul's new album is finished and is being mixed by Trent Reznor and Alan Moulder
