In both his writings and appearance, Richard Wright was acutely attuned to the power of dress to convey meaning and build identity. From his early stories collected in Uncle Tom’s Children, where the clothed and naked bodies of young Southern Black men signify poverty, innocence and, to whites, danger, through his late novel, Savage Holiday, where the naked body of a white man precipitates chaos and disaster, Wright’s attention to clothing and to the naked and nude bodies of Black and white men and women—including his meticulous self-presentation as an expatriate writer in Paris—allowed him to explore how attire and style produced sensations of self. The rituals of dressing (Lawd Today), the temptations of naked skin revealed beneath robes and coats (Native Son, The Outsider), the forms of nudity (“Big Boy Leaves Home,” Savage Holiday), the class dimensions of clothing (Black Boy) serve to display psychological and sociological forces of race, gender, sexuality, and power.

Measuring density

The modern city, as astute critic and vast walker of European cities Walter Benjamin noted, seems at once to epitomize and refute Marx's famous description of Capitalism: All that is solid melts into air. A location understood at its roots to be solidly constructed of bricks and mortar, of concrete and steel, it is full of the ephemera of paper handbills flying down a windy alley, discarded trash left on a street corner, myriad faces glimpsed momentarily in the flow of the crowd: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” The city as site of modern life is a cliché by now. In America, modernism was always an afterthought. So, in Nineteen Nineteen, when ace pilot, Lieutenant Charley Anderson, returns from the war to New York, he looks up Paul and Eveline Johnson in their Greenwich Village apartment because they are the only people he knows in the city after meeting on a ship crossing over, flirting, and drinking together in the mad joy of armistice. “‘My brother wanted me to go into a Ford agency with him out in the Twin Cities, but how can you keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’ ‘But New York’s the capital now,’” replies his hostess.