Richard Wright had every reason to consider himself an outsider. He was born in 1908, an African American in the segregated South, and as he grew up witnessed lynchings and other manifestations of racial prejudice. In the segregated South at that time, it was commonplace for African Americans to feel themselves to be outsiders. It could be argued that as his life proceeded Wright continued to find himself, either through circumstances or his own actions and beliefs, in the position of an outsider. His childhood was deeply unsettled with his family often moving house, and at one point Wright
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