New, carefully focused essays providing a thorough examination of Hemingway's groundbreaking non-fictional work. Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon reveals its author at the height of his intellectual and stylistic powers. By that time, Hemingway had already won critical and popular acclaim for his short stories and novels of the late twenties. A mature and self-confident artist, he now risked his career by switching from fiction to nonfiction, from American characters to Spanish bullfighters, from exotic and romantic settings to the tough world of theSpanish bullring, a world that might seem frightening and even repellant to those who do not understand it. Hemingway's nonfiction has been denied the attention that his novels and short stories have enjoyed, a state of affairs this Companion seeks to remedy, breaking new ground by applying theoretical and critical approaches to a work of nonfiction. It does so in original essays that offer a thorough, balanced examination of a complex, boundary-breaking, and hitherto neglected text. The volume is broken into sections dealing with: the composition, reception, and sources of Death in the Afternoon; cultural translation, cultural criticism, semiotics, and paratextual matters; and the issues of art, authorship, audience, and the literary legacy of Death in the Afternoon. The contributors to the volume, four men and seven women, lay to rest the stereotype of Hemingway as a macho writer whom women do not read; and their nationalities (British, Spanish, American, and Israeli) indicate that Death in the Afternoon, even as it focuses on a particular national art, discusses matters of universal concern. Contributors: Miriam B. Mandel, Robert W. Trogdon, Lisa Tyler, Linda Wagner-Martin, Peter Messent, Beatriz Penas Ibanez, Anthony Brand, Nancy Bredendick, Hilary Justice, Amy Vondrak, and Keneth Kinnamon. MiriamB. Mandel teaches in the English Department of Tel Aviv University.

Following an introductory essay on the conception, composition and reception of the novel, four leading Afro-Americanists examine various aspects of this classic fictional account of violent life and death in a racist society.

African-American writer Richard Wright (19081960) was celebrated during the early 1940s for his searing autobiography (Black Boy) and fiction (Native Son). By 1947 he felt so unwelcome in his homeland that he exiled himself and his family in Paris. But his writings changed American culture forever, and today they are mainstays of literature and composition classes. He and his works are also the subjects of numerous critical essays and commentaries by contemporary writers. This volume presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of those essays, books, and articles from 1983 through 2003. Arranged alphabetically by author within years are some 8,320 entries ranging from unpublished dissertations to book-length studies of African American literature and literary criticism. Also included as an appendix are addenda to the author's earlier bibliography covering the years from 1934 through 1982. This is the exhaustive reference for serious students of Richard Wright and his critics.

For more than two decades Richard Wright was interviewed by the American and foreign press, first as the author of "Uncle Tom's Children" (1938), "Native Son" (1940), and "Black Boy" (1945), next as a famous expatriate recently arrived and lionized in postwar Paris, and finally as the seasoned writer of a dozen books. At the end of his life the young man from Mississippi had become a well-traveled intellectual deeply interested in the social and political as well as literary and racial issues of the Old, the New, and the Third World.

"Conversations with Richard Wright" collects some fifty interviews, many of which are little known in the United States because they appeared in non-English European periodicals and newspapers. This collection reveals a serious, often didactic Wright, giving voice to his inarticulate brothers and sisters as he reveals his racially representative colonialism. Most of his interviewers were white men, and he was always trying to make them listen. European issues also claimed his attention as he struggled to reconcile Marxism, Freudianism, and existentialism to the political realities from 1945 to his death in 1960.