Abstract
The public intellectual, according to Edward Said, is an ‘outsider’, a ‘disturber of the status quo’,1 ‘someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma… someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.’2
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Notes
Edward Said, Introduction, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), p. x.
Interview in L’Express, 18 October 1955, quoted in Conversations with Richard Wright, ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre (University Press of Mississippi, 1993), p. 163.
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce que la littérature?’, Les Temps Modernes, March 1947.
Richard Wright, ‘How “Bigger” Was Born’ (1940), in Native Son, Library of America Edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), p. 523.
James Baldwin, ‘Many Thousands Gone’, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), pp. 30–1.
Michel Fabre makes this point in his biography of Richard Wright, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 456.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 173.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr, ‘“What’s in a Name?” Some Meanings of Blackness’, Loose Canons, Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 140.
James Baldwin, ‘Alas, Poor Richard. Part I’, Nobody Knows My Name (1961; New York: Vintage International, 1989), p. 188.
Ralph Ellison, ‘The World and the Jug’, The New Leader, 9 December 1963;
reprinted in Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967), p. 120.
Eldridge Cleaver’s term. See ‘Notes on a Native Son’, Soul on Ice (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 97.
Allison Davis, Leadership, Love, and Aggression (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983).
Arnold Rampersad, Foreword to Richard Wright, Lawd Today! (1963; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), p. ix.
Sherley Anne Williams, ‘Papa Dick and Sister-Woman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright’, in Fritz Fleischmann (ed.), American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 397.
Beauvoir to Sartre, 11 February 1947, Simone de Beauvoir: Lettres à Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 300.
Simone de Beauvoir, L’Amérique au jour le jour (Paris: Morihien, 1948);
America Day by Day, trans. Patrick Dudley (New York: Grove Press, 1953).
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949; Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1976), p. 23.
Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 199.
Richard Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949).
Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe (1987; London: Picador, 1993), pp. 7–8.
Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945; London: Picador, 1993), p. 295.
Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 83.
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© 1998 Hazel Rowley
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Rowley, H. (1998). Richard Wright: Intellectual Exile. In: Gould, W., Staley, T.F. (eds) Writing the Lives of Writers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26548-0_21
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