“Thorough and engrossing from the first page to the last”

Jame Lamar | Washington Post Book World

“In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright’s very powerful story.”

Darryl Pinckney | New York Review of Books

“Absorbing.”

New Yorker

“Splendid. . . . Richard Wright is well written, prodigiously researched, and nicely paced, a compelling evocation of the man, his craft, and the different worlds through which he moved.”

Michael J. Ybarra | Wall Street Journal

“A welcome and illuminating work . . . [Rowley] does an outstanding job. . . . Rich and revealing.”

Megan Harlan | San Francisco Chronicle

“A magnificent biography, subtle and insightful. . . . Rowley writes with style and grace, and her research on Wright is prodigious.”

Howard Zinn | The Week

"Rowley is an unobtrusive biographer who has written a well-balanced and thoroughly readable book. It now stands as the best account of Wright’s life."

Peter Byrne | Swan's Commentary

"For the first time, Wright’s complicated life and work are fully and justly illuminated."

Booklist

"Tirelessly, imaginatively researched and elegantly written, [the book] examines this enigmatic native son with an exacting but also finely sympathetic eye. The result is a portrait of uncommon penetration and skill--surely one of the finest literary biographies to appear in many a year."

Arnold Rampersad, author of The Life of Langston Hughes

"A first-rate biography worthy of its towering, larger-than-life subject."

Gerald Early | Christian Science Monitor

"Of the books written on Wright to date, [this] new biography . . . is more informative, comprehensive and insightful than any of the earlier efforts. . . . A superb book from start to finish."

Robert Fleming | Book Page

"Rowley has produced the definitive Wright biography. . . . Rowley’s work is everything a literary biography should be: a rich, impeccably detailed rendering of the historical and biographical circumstances surrounding a writer’s work. Critics and teachers of Wright will find Rowley’s work indispensable. Through her careful research . . . Rowley offers readers new facets of Wright as a writer and person, demonstrating above all the heavy toll that Wright’s heroic, groundbreaking anti-racism took on his financial, political, aned psychological well-being."

Andrew Strombeck | Studies in American Naturalism