Richard Wright's haiku, Japanese poetics, and classical chinese poetry

Jianqing Zheng

pp. 23-43

in: Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed), Cross-cultural visions in African American literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

Around two years before his death, Richard Wright, one of the most well-known African American writers in the twentieth century, became fascinated with haiku through his introduction to Sinclair Beiles, a young South African writer in Paris. Wright wrote more than four thousand haiku, of which 817 were collected in Haiku: This Other World, published posthumously in 1998. This collection is doubtlessly a significant addition to the Wright Studies.