* This article is based upon a lecture delivered at the Richard Wright Symposium organized by the University of Iowa in July 1971. Unpublished Wright texts are quoted with the permission of Ellen Wright and may not be reproduced without her permission.

1. This image resulted from the experience of black soldiers in France during World War I. It was also derived from the reports of black writers who had traveled in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Langsten Hughes, Countee Cullen, and even Claude McKay.

2. From an unpublished last section of “American Hunger.”

3. “I Chose Exile,” unpublished article, 1952.

4. Wright declared on June 15, 1946, to M. Scanton: “The City is so won derful, its intellectual life so vital that I don't think I'll return again soon. I do want to see how these people go about things. And it is good to be somewhere where your color is the least important thing about you.”

5. In addition, there is a slight reference to Eva's Paris trip in The Out sider and a few references to Fishbelly's friends and their experiences in France in The Long Dream. France is also used as a setting for the second part of “Man God Ain't Like That.”

6. Had it been published, “Island of Hallucinations” would have made Wright as much an “expatriate” novelist as James Baldwin, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and Frank Yerby. For, on the whole, none of them really deals much with France. Baldwin has one novel only, Giovanni's Room, and one story, “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” over and above his essays. Himes has one novel, Une Affaire de Viol, Smith one novel, The Stone Face, and Yerby one novel, Speak Now, on the relationships of blacks and whites, Americans and French in Paris.

7. “The Algerian war,” he said, “is a war which has nothing to do with the racial problem. French nationalistic feelings, because of industrial development and the incredibly quick healing of the wounds caused by the Second World War, have awakened and are now being employed to forcibly convert Muslims, who are religious fanatics and traditionalists, to French, or if you prefer, Western civilization. My feelings in such circumstances are ambiguous. Frenchmen tell the Muslims at the point of their submachine guns: ‘You are French.’ We, American Negroes, might wish to be forced in a similar way to consider our selves as Americans.” The interviewer, noting Wright's subtle differentiation, stressed that Wright supported liberation movements in black Africa. In answer to a question, Wright also said that “the role of socialism in the liberation of African countries seems to me highly suspicious. Wasn't it Guy Mollet, a socialist, who launched the French attack against Suez?” In that case, Wright had been strongly pro-Nasser and anti-French.

8. Unpublished article, entitled “France Must March,” and probably written in the late 1940s, p. 12. He also states, on p. 11: “Perhaps there is no nation in the world today less psychologically prepared to sense the needs of the people whose voice she can become than France. If there is one thing true about France, it is that she does not know the meaning of modern industrialization, the inevitable levelling of values inherent in it, the equating of man to machines … the race hates attendant upon such crises as men try to escape or project their sufferings upon others to find relief for their misery and excuse for action, all of which lies beyond, as yet, the boundaries of the French popular mind. Also one wonders to what degree the French mind today knows of the sleeping millions in India, Africa, China, and the islands in the Atlantic and the Pacific.”

9. “Vers un néo-réalisme,” Cahiers du Cinéma, Octobre 1948, p. 56.Google Scholar

10. “Sur l'Amérique” Paris, Avril 1950, p. 101.Google Scholar

11. “Hughes Panassié,” La Casserole, 02 1, 1950.Google Scholar