"Richard Wright" (1908-1960) was one of the landmark authors of twentieth-century American literature as well as one of the most formidable and eloquent black voices of his day. In nearly 900 pages the editors have collected his most essential and evocative writing: essays like "Black Power" and "Pagan Spain"; selections from his autobiography Black Boy; most of the photographs and the complete text of Wright's folk history of the African-American experience 12 Million Black Voices; representative criticism, articles, letters, and poetry; the complete novellas "The Man Who Lived Underground" and "Big Black Good Man"; and generous excerpts from novels like Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, The Outsider, The Long Dream, Savage Holiday, and Lawd Today. The result is a beautifully wrought miniature panorama of the career of a writer whose immense talent was matched only by his humanity. "This fat omnibus volume, containing generous portions of Wright's fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and poetry, reintroduces to a new generation in convenient format a remarkable stylist, a passionate champion of justice, an early interpreter of black thoughts and attitudes, and probably the first major black novelist to achieve international fame" (LJ 1/15/78). Along with Wright's own text, this is buttressed with explanatory notes, biographical data, and a chronological bibliography of the author's works. For all collections. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.