Black male spectators in Wright's fiction were drawn to the fascination of watching white characters on the screen in the Jim Crow Era.   They were nonetheless aware that their desires for the seductive women on the screen or in the posters were taboo during this time, creating a sense of alienation and only forced ability to identify with white protagonists. This article analyzes the responses of Jake in Lawd Today! and of Bigger in Native Son as they succumb to the temptations of the glittery world of movies on the screen and in movie posters. The article then turns to Wright's exploration of later characters in "The Man Who Lived Underground" and Cross Damom in The Outsiders, who can be considered cinematic seers. The characters place themselves as protagonists in film plots and create their own sense of power over how cinema portrayed Black males. Wright wanted to find ways for more Black impact on both cinema and other forms of media culture This trajectory is traced in the article.

Wright’s literary career was encouraged by the Communist Party-sponsored John Reed Club and nurtured within the proletarian literary movement whose writers were committed to representing class inequality and warfare from the standpoint of the eventual triumph of the proletariat. Like many other proletarian writers, his fiction is, therefore, strongly influenced by the philosophy of dialectical materialism popular within the Communist movement. Wright’s fiction, notably Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, powerfully synthesizes a dialectical perspective with literary realist and naturalist representational techniques, although he also experimented with avant-garde literary techniques he associated with the likes of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, as evident in Lawd Today! His fiction depicts the ways in which his mostly poor, working-class black characters suffer intensely from the class system of capitalism and the racism it engenders. It also depicts the inherent potentials within his characters’ lives to transcend ideologically and materially the inimical social system at the root of their suffering.

Richard Wright published four major books between 1938 and 1945: Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Native Son (1940), 12 Million Black Voices (1941), and Black Boy (1945). This essay discusses how Black Boy converses with the preceding three books, and how, thereby, they all contextualize each other. They are all migration narratives presenting African Americans moving from South to North in the Great Migration era. They portray black boys including Wright himself migrating from boyhood to young manhood. Collectively, they present Wright migrating into his writing career, his writing self. Once there, he can be a racial “we” and a personal “I.” Special attention is given to how 12 Million anticipates Black Boy. Quite specifically, the racial “we” in 12 Million becomes the “I” in Black Boy who tells his own story and his race’s story of starving variously in a neglectful American nation. The FSA photographs in 12 Million led Wright to see himself and others among the black people portrayed. Hearing the voices, seeing the faces, and seeing himself prepared Wright for composing American Hunger. What came out in 1945 was Black Boy, the portion of his story before he headed North.