It is difficult to embrace oneself when surrounded by rejection. Abraham Maslow, American psychologist, crafted his “Hierarchy of Needs” in 1943. The pyramidal structure caps off with the necessity of “self-actualization,” which stresses the...

Richard Wright's novel Black Boy is not only a story about one man's struggle to find freedom and intellectual happiness, it is a story about his discovery of language's inherent strengths and weaknesses. And the ways in which its power can...

In his autobiographical account, Black Boy, Richard Wright instills in the reader the hunger that he felt for knowledge, as this drive had been suppressed by his environment. Wright's quest for knowledge and literacy parallels that of W. E. B....

Prior to the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance, the voice of the African American narrative was relegated to stories derived from folk traditions. Tall tales, fables, trickster stories and preacher tales dominated the body of African American...

The Christian religion plays a key role in both Flannery O’Connor’s <i>Wise Blood</i> and Richard Wright’s <i>Black Boy</i>. Despite the authors’ ideological differences, both Wright’s childhood self and O’Connor’s...

In Richard Wright’s autobiographical novel Black Boy, the narrator frequently speaks about his severe physical hunger and the emptiness it brings him. While his physical hunger shapes his actions as a child, the gravity of the emotional and...

The world is full of predispositions that favor the majority and hinder minorities. James McBride’s memoir, The Color of Water, and Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, both address the disadvantages that minorities face. In these...

Isaac Newton, a prominent English physicist and mathematician, devised his 3rd law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the autobiography Black Boy by Richard Wright, a key influence in Richard's life is his...

There is an incomprehensible secret embodied in the highly intimate affair of someone else’s emotions. Even when the thoughts of others come fully into the orbit of one’s concern, they are often difficult to dissect and subsequently understand....

James Baldwin’s “On Being ‘White’ and Other Lies” provides a radical interpretation of the term “white” as a completely voluntary identity, formed solely because of the need to suppress Blackness when our nation first gained its footing. Written...

Essay Prompt:

Writers often highlight the values of a culture or society by using characters who are alienated from that culture or society because of gender, race, class or creed. Discuss Bigger Thomas as such a character and show how his...

A preacher enters the cell of a young man condemned by all before the trial has even begun, and begins powerfully exhorting the young man to give himself to the Lord Jesus and be redeemed. And yet this young man, standing at the very edge of...

Understanding the mindset and motivations of Richard Wright while writing Native Son proves to be important in understanding the effect of the novel on society. "Wright... was caught up in a hideous present moment, the Great Depression years and...

Fear is a common emotional thread woven deep within the fabric of mankind. It drives our actions, dictates our beliefs and sometimes, as in the case of Bigger Thomas, mandates the type of person we become. An old adage states that the single...

In his novel “Native Son,” author Richard Wright depicts the struggles of Bigger Thomas, whose life reaches a major turning point after he kills Mary Dalton. The difference between Bigger’s dreams and the “illusion” of reality plays a significant...

In Book One of Richard Wrights novel “Native Son,” Mary Dalton is, to her parents’ disapproval, a member of the Communist movement set in 1930’s Chicago. Mary attempts to achieve her dream of extinguishing the barriers between African-Americans...

Blindness is prevalent all throughout human society and more specifically, all throughout human nature. To be blind can mean a myriad of things. Literally and physically, it means to lack proper vision. When taking that definition to a figurative...

Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, both African American authors active in the middle of the twentieth century, took on the challenge of exploring and exposing the adversity that African Americans faced through their writing. They brought to light...

Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, exemplifies classic, African-American literature that raises serious questions about how deeply racial oppression damages Blacks. Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism exposes how racism subjects Blacks to the...

Existentialism emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. Contrarily, environmental determinism suggests that society shapes individuals, allowing...

When writing The White Tiger and Native Son, Aravind Adiga and Richard Wright utilized setting to influence the plot of the novels, by having the stories of their characters happen in very regulated and controlling societies. Their extreme...

In the Native Son, Richard Wright cultivates supporting characters as threats to the main character Bigger in ways that range from being highly significant to extremely minimal. In analyzing the way the African American women are represented in...

Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) is submerged in heightened emotion as it deals with Bigger Thomas’s life in segregated Southside Chicago in the 1930s. Depravity intertwines so deeply with Bigger’s narrative in the novel that there seems to be a...

The “American Dream” connotes a vision of a house with a white picket fence, a place of warmth and family, a secure place to lay one's head at night, a place to just be. Much of African-American literature since the 1900's demonstrates that the...