| Wright first gained attention for his collection of (originally) four short stories, Uncle Tom's Children (1937), which earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship. In this work he fictionalised the incidents of lynching in the Deep South. He followed with a novel Native Son (1940), which was the first Book of the Month Club recommendation by an African American author. Here the lead character, Bigger Thomas, was intended by Wright to be a representation of the limitations that society placed on African Americans, that Thomas could only gain his own agency and self-knowledge through the heinous acts that he commits. Wright was much criticized for both works' concentration on violence, and, in the case of Native Son, for a portrayal of a black person which might be seen as confirming whites' worst fears. Wright is also renowned for the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), which describes his early life from Roxie through his move to Chicago, his clashes with his Seventh-day Adventist family, his difficulties with white employers and social isolation. American Hunger, (published posthumously in 1977) was originally intended as the second book of Black Boy and is restored to this form in the Library of America edition. This details his involvement with the John Reed Clubs and then (ambivalently) the Communist Party, which he left in 1942, though the book implies that it was earlier, and the fact was not made public until 1944. In its restored form, its diptych structure mirrors the certainties and intolerance of organised communism, (the "bourgeois" books and condemned members) with similar qualities in fundamentalist organized religion. During McCarthyism, his membership in the Communist Party resulted in him and his works being blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses in the 1950s. Reference |  |