Zora Neale Hurston, Ed. by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Hurston’s spats with leading male cultural and political luminaries, which exhibited her trademark blend of Southern eloquence and venom, are among the most engaging pieces ... Hurston slipped with ease between folklorist and anthropologist ... The essays in You Don’t Know Us Negroes, served well by careful notes, allow Hurston to emerge as contradictory, uneven, lively and brilliant.
Richard Wright
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The tale of the tunnel burglar, as he was also known, gripped the imagination of Richard Wright (no relation), who had long held a fascination with detective stories and pulp fiction, as illustrated by his uneven psychological thriller Savage Holiday. Although the tunnel burglar was white, Wright saw parallels between his subterranean existence and the ways in which African Americans were forced to live out of sight in American society ... The claim that Wright’s story succeeded in terms of narrative, rather than on \'suspected implications\', underscores the ways in which his reputation as a novelist waned as literary theory changed direction ... Recent critical opinion has been less kind to Wright than to Baldwin, whose work has enjoyed a startling renaissance, or to Ellison, whose reputation as a nuanced, jazz-inflected stylist is unsurpassed. Wright’s work is depicted – at times unjustly – as one-dimensional, even tone-deaf, lacking the elegance and panache of those younger writers ... Too often in the book, the author’s views – seen here at the stage of a first date in his passionate dalliance with existentialism – are proclaimed. These are moments in which the reader hears Wright, rather than the internal conflict of his protagonist ... Despite these authorial intrusions, the novel is well paced ... an absorbing story told through discordant narrative styles ... Wright, who is capable of subtlety, doesn’t trust nuance to do the work ... Wright achieved a lyrical clarity that his fiction could not always sustain; it was a reminder that his fractured genius could proclaim softly.
