Richard Wright (1908-1960)

Fiction

Uncle Tom's Children (1938)
Native Son (1940)
The Outsider (1953)
Savage Holiday (1954)
The Long Dream (1958)
Eight Men (1961)
Lawd Today (1963)
Rite of Passage (1994)
A Father's Law (2008)

Nonfiction

How “Bigger” Was Born: the Story of Native Son (1940)
12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941)
Black Boy (1945)
Black Power (1954)
The Color Curtain (1956)
Pagan Spain (1957)
Letters to Joe C. Brown (1968)
American Hunger (1975)
Big Boy Leaves Home (2007)

Essays

The Ethics Of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch (1937)
Introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945)
I Choose Exile (1951)
White Man, Listen! (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1957)

Poetry
Haiku: This Other World. (Eds. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener, 1998)

Note : I used an article in Wikipedia for this list. Richard Wright photographed in 1939 by Carl Van Vechten.

I think it important to read a person's body of work in order. I prefer to read an author's earliest works first. This allows me to grow along with the author as he becomes less timid in his skills, and I less timid in my comprehension of his work. For example, when one completes crossword puzzles in a magazine, one will start with the easier puzzles in front and work through to the harder ones in the back. One finds the clues beginning to repeat, but in a more sophisticated manner such as furry pet equals cat to lap warmer equals cat. Do you agree or disagree? ~ Maggie