Richard Wright was arguably the preeminent African American writer of the mid–twentieth century. Growing up in poverty amidst Jim Crow racism in Mississippi, he received little education outside of a library. Nonetheless, he was brilliant and a voracious writer. He lived an itinerant existence as a young man, moving between Mississippi, Memphis, and Chicago before finally landing in New York City at the end of the Harlem Renaissance. All the time, he was writing short stories, poetry, and politics, and he became a communist in 1935, assuming a position as a bureau editor of the party’s official newspaper, the Daily Worker. In 1937 he was asked to become an associate editor of New Challenge, a literary journal receiving a reboot from its founder, the author Dorothy West.