Jim Crow Gothic: Richard Wright's Southern Nightmare

African American author Richard Wright is best known for his novels dealing with the early twentieth-century urban ghetto, such as Native Son (1940) and The Outsider (1953), both of which draw extensively on the Gothic. However, his most terrifying work is the collection of short stories set in the rural South of his youth. In Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Wright presents a dark landscape shaped by fear, racial contempt and moral monstrosity. This collection of short stories returns again and again to horrific scenes of white violence against African Americans, exposing the brutal reign of terror that enforced Jim Crow in the first decades of the twentieth century and that constitutes the historical core of the Southern Gothi