In Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen (Ivan R. Dee), Jennifer Jensen Wallach traces the life of the author best known for his novel Native Son and notes the effect of his work on later African American writers.

Wallach, assistant professor of history, follows Wright from his origins as a sharecropper’s son in Mississippi to his life as an American expatriate in Paris involved with Marxism, existentialism and Pan-Africanism. She says her goal was “to examine Wright’s various attempts to answer the driving question of his life, ‘How can I live freely?’” The book was published in 2010, the 50th anniversary of his death.