On Richard Wright’s THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND from London Review of Books

When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies. In Paris he was a celebrity. French writers and American expatriates flocked to the Café Monaco, where he held court a short walk from his Left Bank flat. ‘Dick greeted everyone with boisterous condescension,’ Chester Himes remembered. ‘It was obvious he was the king thereabouts.’

Vol. 43 No. 19 · 7 October 2021
Outcasts and Desperados
Adam Shatz

Read the rest of the essay on this link: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n19/adam-shatz/outcasts-and-desperados