Recently, I had occasion to read, after many years of thinking about doing so, Richard Wright's The Outsider.  Although Wright, who was born in 1908 and died in 1960, is perhaps better known for his Native Son, after reading The Outsider, I have come to conclude that the latter is the more compelling read.  Its insights into the effects of racism on those who experience it are singularly profound.  One marvels that Wright was able to put such painful profundity on paper amidst the otherwise "happy" world of the American Fifties.

    While I won't reveal much of the plot, I will say that the novel features a young man named Cross Damon who, like Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, finds himself caught in a web of almost unimaginable circumstances, circumstances largely driven by his positions on racism and communism, from which he cannot extract himself.  It's a study in frustration, yet also a paean to individual perseverance.  Reading it makes one wonder, as Cross often did, what life's point really is.  Cross rejects religion and what he perceives as its pie-in-the-sky hope, and dismisses communism as an empty philosophy that focuses solely on power and which pays little heed to the true nature of the human being.  He is therefore left with a world without meaning.  Although he later comes to think that perhaps love is the answer to a cold world, he finds that he cannot be loved.

    In the end, all he has left, or so he thinks, is the Law.  The Law as the ultimate ordering element in our lives, the Law to which we are all subject, the Law that governs all of our affairs.  Yet the Law is impersonal.  It will not help him nor will it  condemn him.  So Cross becomes the ultimate outsider:  in rejecting or being rejected by everything around him, he fades away into a frightful anonymity.

    No one even knows he lived.