Richard Wright – Native Son

Discussion Question 1:

Why does Bigger feel like “something awful's going to happen to” him? (23)

Discussion Question 2:

Who are the “Reds” Peggy Dalton spends some of her free time with? (58)

Fact:

Richard Wright was a committed communist, even though he had had some bad experiences connected to different members of the communist party in the United States.

(http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/r_wright/wright_life.htm). 

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/CPUSA_logo.svg

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States, and was established in 1919. Until the 1950s, the CPUSA was the largest and most influential communist party in the United States. It played a prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in founding most of the country's first industrial unions while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of U.S. racial segregation. But the CPUSA's early successes did not last. The second Red Scare, which denotes the promotion of fear of national and foreign communists influencing society and infiltrating the federal government used by anti-leftist proponents (this is depicted by Wright, when he describes how the police and the newspapers react to the involevement of members of the communist party in the case) , and the adversities of the continued Cold War mentality, steadily weakened the Communist Party's internal structure and confidence. CPUSA's close adherence to the political positions of the Soviet Union enabled anti-communist critics to constantly present the party as not only a threatening, subversive domestic entity, but also as a "foreign" agent fundamentally alien to the "American way of life". Internal and external crises swirled together, to the point where members who did not end up in prison for party activities tended either to disappear quietly from its ranks or to adopt more moderate political positions at odds with the CPUSA's party line. 

Nella Larsen – Quicksand

Discussion Question 1:

Why is Helga Crane so dissatisfied with the teaching atmosphere at Naxos? Would you consider this atmosphere or surroundings as not advancing the studying among the students? (Chapters 1 + 2).

Discussion Question 2:

Why does Helga Crane consider Anne Grey as inconsistent in her attitudes towards race and lifestyle? (Chapter 9).

Fact:

The novel Quicksand is loosely based on experiences Larsen made in her earlier life, as she was the daughter of a Danish mother and a colored father, studied and worked in a Southern university and later went to New York to find work there. She also lived with her Danish relatives for a period of time, and later married a physicist, finding it difficult to find her place in society throughout all her life.

(http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Larsen_Nella.html). 

Nella Larsen, who worked as a nurse, and only published two novels and one short story, was considered part of the Harlem Renaissance, which was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", and although it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson, who was also and important writer during that period, preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, was placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression), eventhough many of its ideas lived on much longer.