Review by Choice Review
This new edition of Richard Wright's last work, Eight Men, is long overdue. First published in 1961, the assortment of five stories, two radio plays, and an autobiographical essay has since survived piecemeal, in anthologies, with little opportunity for examining the complete text. David Bradley writes an illuminating foreword, reviewing the history of the various pieces that Wright struggled to publish, often in different versions. It is a sad story of dogged determination in the face of racial patronization, commercial indifference, and editorial interference. The result, alas, is not very successful. As Bradley says, Eight Men has no unified conception, and the stories are uneven in quality. The best, ``The Man Who Lived Underground'' and ``The Man Who Was Almost a Man,'' reveal in the context of the whole work the second-rate nature of ``The Man Who Killed a Shadow'' and ``Man, God Ain't Like That,'' which are pale variations on the standard racial theme of social injustice, seen in terms of gothic melodrama. The importance of Eight Men lies in its history and in the fitful, if genuinely inspired, fictive moments of an afternoon of an author.-E. Guereschi, St. John's University, N.Y. QQ
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review