Richard Wright

""How in hell did you happen?" the Chicago sociologist Robert Park once asked Richard Wright. Hazel Rowley shows how, chronicling with the dramatic drive of a novel Wright's extraordinary journey from a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi to international renown as a writer, fiercely independent thinker, and outspoken critic of racism.". "The author draws on recently discovered material to shed new light on Wright's relationships with a variety of women, including Carson McCullers, Gertrude Stein, and his longtime wife, Ellen Poplowitz, and male friends such as Langston Hughes, Nelson Algren,…