How to read Richard Wright without resenting it

Black Boy, Native Son, and The Outsider are all common high school and college required reads, but that doesn't mean you should grab the Cliff's Notes and never glance at a page of one of Richard Wright's famous and influential works.  All three of these are very worthwhile reads, even for people who aren't particularly in to literature or African American studes.  Here's how to read these books if you're averse to books in general or to Afam Lit...

If you don't like to read:

You'll probably enjoy Richard Wright more than Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, and Herman Melville.  Why?  He writes in a very accessible style used by many authors in the twentieth century.  His sentences are short and his descriptions, while lengthy in places, hinge on realism and distinct aspects of the human experience.  He tends to be concrete rather than abstract, and makes politics human in a compelling way.  Keeping up with the characters may be your biggest challenge, not understanding the action.  Black Boy reads more like an autobiography, though it also has fictional aspects, Native Son revolves around a distinctly racial conflict, and The Outsider is more of an existential piece, aligning itself with political and human conflicts rather than racial.  The Outsider especially has shorter sentences and more concrete descriptions-- think The Stranger, in which Camus deliberately went for an "American style" of shorter sentences and more direct statements.

There are decently spaced chapters in all three of these novels, not to mention they are all page-turners.  Native Son and The Outsider are both murder stories, and have a very dramatic psychological feel.  I couldn't put them down, and not just because I had to have a paper written on them by the next day.

If you don't like African American literature:

First of all, you probably don't like it because you think to yourself "I'm just a white girl.  What could this possibly have to do with me?"  That is ridiculous-- the black struggle within literature is a struggle that anyone can identify with.  You don't have to be a fisherman to read Moby Dick-- you don't have to be a soldier to read A Farewell to Arms-- so give up the lame excuses that you're not a part of the group.  In fact, feeling like an outsider to the black experience is, in a way, how Wright wants you to feel, because the people he's talking about are outsiders to the American experience and to the human experience in general.  Anything that can help you share that is useful.  Or maybe you think to yourself, "African American literature just isn't as good as 'regular' literature."  This, also, is ridiculous.  Firstly, it's a misnomer to even have a subcategory for Afam lit.  African Americans are Americans just like everyone else in America, and thus a part of American lit.  Latino literature, Asian American literature, Womens literature-- these are all completely unnecessary subcategories that create the illusion that the literature within them is somehow not normal simply because the authors weren't male and white.  This is unfair to the minority groups as well as to all those white men that we continually complain about dictating the terms of the status quo.  Consider African American literature as simply American literature-- this makes a lot more sense, because African American authors are a whole lot more American than folks like Henry James, who spent most of his life in Europe, or T.S. Eliot, who basically became a Brit.  I'm sick of having to take a "multicultural" class to learn about subcultures in the U.S.-- we're made of subcultures, so the status quo should be to read all kinds of literature and authors.  Not to mention, for those of you who still don't want to read Afam. lit, Richard Wright's novels consistently rank among polls of the best of the twentieth century-- color of the author not withstanding.  Wright was a very literary writer, and it is in no way patronizing for critics to praise and value his contribution to American Lit.  So don't think you're reading Black Boy just because he's black.