Charles Wright, Novelist

Charles Stevenson Wright was born June 4, 1932 [passed, Oct. 1 2008] , in New Franklin, Mo. His mother died when he was 4, and his father, a railroad porter, sent him to live with his maternal grandmother. When he was 14, they moved to another central Missouri town, Sedalia.

By that age, Charles was an avid reader and knew he wished to be a writer; he dropped out of high school and spent his days in the library, and according to one story he told the Hodenfield family, he would read magazines in their bound stacks at the railroad station because he knew that once they got to the local drugstore, he wouldn't be allowed in to look at them.

At 17, having read about the Handy Writers' Colony in Marshall, Ill., newly founded by the novelist James Jones and others, he went there.

Mr. Wright served in the Army during the Korean War and moved to New York in his 20s. An early novel was rejected by Farrar, Straus, but an editor there encouraged him to write his own story, which became 'The Messenger.' Over the next decade, his profligate habits ' he told one interviewer his hobbies were smoking and drinking ' seized hold of him. Mr. Hodenfield, who in the late 1960s was working at GQ Scene, a magazine for teenage boys, assigned him to write an article about Motown. 'Excerpt New York Times Article, published: October 8, 2008 written by Bruce Weber

Absolutely nothing to get Alarmed About: The Complete Novels of Charles Wright: The Messenger, The Wig, Absolutely nothing to get Alarmed About
Click to order via Amazon

Paperback: 624 pages
Publisher: Harpercollins; Paperback Original edition (January 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 006096958X
ISBN-13: 978-0060969585
Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 1 inches

Included Wrights Novels:

The Messenger. New York, Farrar Straus, 1963; London, Souvenir Press, 1964.

The Wig: A Mirror Image. New York, Farrar Straus, 1966; London, Souvenir Press, 1967.

Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About. New York, Farrar Straus, 1973.

The Messenger

In The Messenger (1963), Wright draws so extensively upon his life that fact and fiction often blur. Realistically narrated in the first person by a fair-skinned black Manhattanite named Charles Stevenson, the novel dramatizes the isolation and alienation of persons who fall prey to America's social, economic, and racial caste systems. Stevenson, a New York City messenger, constantly finds himself on the edges of power, yet is utterly devoid of any. A man perceived as neither black nor white, 'a minority within a minority,' he is cast adrift in the naturalistic city of New York, where victory and defeat are accepted 'with the same marvelous indifference.'

The Messenger brought Wright recognition and modest commercial success, but initially his 1966 novel The Wig was not well-received. Today, however, many people would agree with Ishmael Reed's 1973 assertion that The Wig is 'one of the most underrated novels by a black person in this century' (John O'Brien, Interviews with Black Writers, 1973). '(John O'Brien, Interviews with Black Writers, 1973)

The Wig
Click to order via Amazon

by Charles Wright, Ishmael Reed (Introduction)

ISBN: 1562791273
Format: Paperback, 192pp
Pub. Date: February 2003
Publisher: Mercury House

Read an AALBC.com Book Review

An absurdist Candide in Harlem, told by the first "black, black humorist."

THE WIG is the story of Lester Jefferson, a young man of good will, whose repeated attempts to become a part of The Great Society are doomed in advance. Aided, thwarted, and confused by numerous, curious companions, Lester conducts his inevitable search for happiness in a series of absurdist misadventures that begins with the transformation of the hair on his head into burnished silken curls.

When Charles Wright's THE WIG was published in 1966, Conrad Knickerbocker declared it 'A brutal, exciting, and necessary book' (The New York Times). And yet'in contrast to the raging success of Wright's debut, The Messenger'The Wig was largely overlooked by the media.

When asked to participate in the NEA Heritage & Preservation Series, Ishmael Reed immediately proposed THE WIG. Reed considers this work 'one of the most underrated novels written by a black person in this century,' and credits the book with influencing his own prose technique. Later criticism mirrors Reed's assessment, naming THE WIG Wright's most significant accomplishment and identifying this novel as misunderstood, misinterpreted, and definitely ahead of its time.

By reviving THE WIG, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and with Ishmael Reed's ringing endorsement, Mercury House aims to elevate Charles Wright's electric novel to its proper position within the literary hierarchy.

"Charles Wright's THE WIG marked a change in African-American fiction. All of us who wanted to 'experiment,' as we were seeing our painter and musician friends experiment, used it as a model. Though some would call me the literary son of Ralph Ellison, in the 1960s I was the younger brother of Charles Wright."
'from the introduction by Ishmael Reed

Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About
Click to order via Amazon

Hardcover: 215 pages
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux; 1st edition (January 1973)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374114080