By 1937, when Richard Wright’s important essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing” was published in the New Challenger journal, the Harlem Renaissance had been over for years. The Great Depression had taken its toll on African-American writing and other arts. Waves of blacks continued to pour into Chicago, New York, and other northern cities. For many of them, poverty and discrimination dominated their lives in their segregated neighborhoods.
Richard Wright’s family had encountered this when they moved from the South to Chicago’s South Side in 1927. By the time he wrote “Blueprint,” these and other experiences had led Wright to the Communist Party. This clearly influenced his approach to his own writing, including his novels and stories—alternately described as social realism or naturalism—and to the writing of other African Americans.
In “Blueprint for Negro Writing” Wright does not mince words. He begins with “Generally speaking, Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America.”
As a communist with an international view, he argues against what he calls the “problem of Negro nationalism.” He says, “Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them.”
In other words, Wright wants more from African-American writers than Langston Hughes suggested in his essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” For Hughes and other Harlem Renaissance writers, the expectation was to write unfettered about black life. Certainly for his time, this suggestion was innovative.
However, Wright sees another purpose for the writer: to work to change unjust social, political and economic areas in American society. He says, “This raises the question of the personality of the writer. It means that in the lives of Negro writers must be found those materials and experiences which will create a meaningful picture of the world today. … And, in turn, this changed world will dialectically change the writer.”
For Richard Wright in this essay, Marxism is the “starting point” for the African-American artist. He believes that this “ism” will give clarity to the writer’s vision of “the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people.”
The theories proposed in this essay influenced other writers of his time and even thereafter. Meanwhile, he published his, now classic best-selling novel, Native Son, in 1941. Eventually, Wright himself became disillusioned with the Communist Party and broke with it in 1944.
