Richard Wright’s was truly a life defined by struggle, and by his death at age fifty-two in 1962, he had acquired a massive amount of political baggage that was bursting with a contradictory array of statements and actions. Among other things, Wright stands alone among African American authors of fiction, poetry, and drama in his providing a detailed, autobiographical memoir of life in the Communist Party (CP-USA), which lasted about ten years. Moreover, Wright scholars have long been aware that there was always something elliptical if not cryptic about the articulation of Wright’s political views in the years after his departure from that movement and the United States.   This essay begins by demonstrating that much of the present-day confusion regarding Wright’s brand of Marxist politics toward the mid-1940s and after can be traced back to interpretations of what he resolved when he wrote the memoir “I Tried to Be a Communist.” It concludes by querying the extent to which his political evolution was representative--or uncharacteristic--of the experience of the dozens of African American imaginative writers with CP-USA affiliations, every last one of whom drew back from the organization at some point.

When John Steinbeck's masterwork The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, the Communist Party's Daily Worker applauded it beneath the headline, “The Grapes of Wrath is a Great Proletarian Novel.” The reviewer's uncritical admiration was effusive:

A few weeks later, the Party-sponsored weekly magazine New Masses put forward a more systematic appraisal by Granville Hicks, a public member of the Party and author of the notable Marxist critical study The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War (1933; revised 1935). Hicks's verdict was identical:

The appeal of the Left

The literary category of US Writers on the Left was initially delimited by Daniel Aaron in his 1961 Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. The genus pertains chiefly to mid-twentieth century authors and literary intellectuals inspired by the ideas of Marxism, most notably through an attraction to the Communist-led cultural movement. During the first two decades, only a modest number of distinguished poets, novelists, critics, and dramatists declared themselves socialists; they fashioned an amorphous, somewhat Bohemian legacy of art in the service of the emancipation of the working class in the pages of publications such as the Masses and the Liberator. This heritage would be revivified in new form as a repercussion of the social crisis of the 1930s when an extraordinary number of the most gifted writers veered precipitously in the direction of the revolutionary Left. During the 1940s, this tradition of “littérature engagée” evolved as a constituent component of the cultural mainstream, but in the 1950s it was ultimately marginalized by the anti-radical political repression of the McCarthy era.

The Bolshevik rendition of Marxism is the conspicuous political feature at the heart of this legacy. Sundry of the most capable writers were passionately enthralled by the ideals of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, which they believed to be embodied in the activities and ideology of the Communist Party. Even Left critics of the Stalin regime often based their condemnation on writings by Lenin and Trotsky. The attraction remained potent through World War II but waned as the Cold War began.