When Making Art Means Leaving the United States

In the June 1940 issue of , the iconoclastic Black American author Richard Wright a review of his recently published novel, , that had appeared in this magazine . Wright’s rebuttal, titled “I Bite the Hand That Feeds Me,” took his reviewer to task for a great many critical misreadings, most involving his characterization of the novel’s murderous protagonist, Bigger Thomas. But among the most arresting lines was an observation wholly removed from Chicago, where is set, and Mississippi, where both Wright and the critic, David L. Cohn, were born. After asserting that “the Negro problem in America is beyond solution,” Wright dropped a parenthetical that portended a core tension in his future work: “I write from a country—Mexico—where people of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority. Whites and Indians live and work and die here, always resisting the attempts of Anglo-Saxon tourists and industrialists to introduce