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Bledsoe's Elaborate Scam

Looking back on the college in Invisible Man, more and more oddities seem to stand out. From the weird religious feeling surrounding the Founder to the complete disregard for education, the entire institution seems completely backwards. For example, when one usually thinks of a college, one will think of an institution focused on learning and based around the needs of the students. While in Bledsoe’s college, the focus is instead on the white patrons that come and visit, as well as Bledsoe himself. When one really thinks about it, the college itself is just a con used to boost the status and wealth of first the Founder, and now Bledsoe.  Think about it, whenever the Founder is mentioned it is with a religious reverence. Even the old white men were seen crying about his death. It was also mentioned that everyone knew who he was, and he traveled around the country in a private train car surrounded by rich people. Whenever he would show up for one of his rallies, it would be comp...
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Wright's Communist Bias

How did Richard Wright's affiliation with the communist party affect his depiction of the communists in Native Son  especially Jan and Max. Wright spend nearly eight years writing for the communists in Chicago, whether it was for one of their many magazines, or for a novel promoting communism. He formed close relationships with many of their members, and only left the party after having a falling out with a select few of the leaders. This could have influenced his depiction of the communist party in Native Son . On one hand he probably still was very fond of the communists, and would have written them in a better light, or on the other hand he could have sent a draft of the book to some of his former colleagues who could have then pressured him into making his depiction more favorable. I don't personally know very much about what the communist party was actually like in 1940s Chicago, but the books depiction of them is very favorable, which combined with Wright's connect...
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The Harlem Conversation

            One of the really interesting things about the last three books that we’ve read is how closely together chronologically they were written. All of the different authors knew each other at least by name, and even wrote commentary on each other’s work. We’ve seen this especially with Wright’s review of  Their Eyes Were Watching God . Looking at this, we can then start to see these books as reactions to each other, or even as the authors themselves having a conversation or argument through their literature. All of these books were written during the Harlem Renaissance, and were very different expressions of black culture at the time, expressing different opinions of what exactly it meant to be writing black literature. The first of these books to come out was Hurston’s  Their Eyes Were Watching God , which was published in 1937 and focused mainly on expressing a very specific form of black culture in the south, almost completely disr...
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