"White Fog"

UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN -- Richard Wright--Harper ($2.50).

The U. S. has never had a first-rate Negro novelist. Last week the promise of one appeared. Uncle Tom's Children, the first book of a 29-year-old, Mississippi-born Negro, won a $500 prize from Story Magazine as the best creative work done by any of the 1,200 writers on the Federal Writers' Project.

Unlike most Negro writers, Wright is neither subjective nor sentimental. A few readers will find misleading resemblances to John Steinbeck. But a closer comparison is with Stephen Crane. Like Crane, who wrote his Civil War masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, without ever having seen a battle, Richard Wright has written the most powerful stories of lynch violence in U. S. literature without ever having seen a lynching. (He did, however, spend most of his first 17 years in Mississippi, which in all the U.S. has the worst record for lynchings: 591 out of 5,112 recorded since 1882.)

Crane's imaginative compass, which held his story to a psychological true North, was the conflict between his hero's blind instinct for self-preservation and an impersonal war machine. The core of Wright's stories is the conflict between the Negro's instinct for self-preservation and an impersonal, unpredictable lynch machine. The sadistic, melodramatic physical details of his lynchings occur within an almost off-stage irrelevance. Their reality is the "white fog" of lynch terror which hangs over the Negro community, impenetrable to the brightest Southern sunlight. It is this central psychological core of Negro life in the Deep South, communicated in clear, unemotional prose, which gives Wright's stories their intensity, and a kind of impersonal eloquence in voicing the tragedy of his people.

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