Reading Order
The Outsider Reading Order
The Outsider (1953) by Richard Wright is his second novel and the most philosophically ambitious work of African-American fiction of the 20th century — a novel of ideas in the existentialist mode, following Cross Damon, a Black man in Chicago who fakes his own death in a train accident and uses the opportunity to reinvent himself, only to find that freedom from his past brings him into contact with the Communist Party's totalitarian structures and with the violence that erupts when a man who has decided there are no moral constraints acts on that decision. Written after Wright's self-exile to France (he had moved to Paris in 1947), The Outsider shows his engagement with French existentialism — particularly Sartre and Camus — and his attempt to think through what existentialism means for a Black American, for whom the experience of radical freedom (freedom from social constraints, from identity, from history) is both more and less available than it is for a white European. Cross Damon is Wright's most intellectually self-aware protagonist — he reads philosophy, quotes Kierkegaard, thinks in abstractions — and the novel is Wright's most direct engagement with the question of what it means to be free. The conclusion — that freedom without ethics leads to murder and that the individual without community is monstrous — is the novel's argument, and it is one that Wright arrived at through the same intellectual seriousness that made him one of the great African-American intellectuals of the 20th century.
Where to start
The Outsider — any HarperCollins or Perennial Classics edition. The novel's existentialist philosophy is most accessible if you read it alongside some context for postwar French existentialism; a brief acquaintance with Camus's The Stranger is the most useful preparation.
Complete The Outsider Book List
- 1Buy
The Outsider
Richard Wright·1953·The novel — Cross Damon fakes his death and reinvents himself, only to find that radical freedom leads to murder; Wright's most philosophically ambitious work and the most direct African-American engagement with French existentialism. - 2Buy
Native Son
Richard Wright·1940·Wright's breakthrough novel — Bigger Thomas's destruction in Chicago; the predecessor in Wright's account of what happens to a Black man who acts on a freedom the world denies him, in a social-realist rather than philosophical mode. - 3Buy
Black Boy
Richard Wright·1945·Wright's autobiography — the personal account of the self-education and fury that became The Outsider's intellectual protagonist; the memoir that explains where Cross Damon's hunger for ideas comes from. - 4Buy
The Stranger
Albert Camus·1942·Camus's existentialist novel — the direct European predecessor that Wright is in dialogue with; Meursault's radical indifference to moral convention is the French version of Cross Damon's experiment in freedom. - 5Buy
Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre·1938·Sartre's existentialist novel — the other French predecessor; Roquentin's nauseous experience of existence without essence is the philosophical background to Cross Damon's more violent experiment. - 6Buy
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison·1952·Ellison's Black American classic — published a year before The Outsider, the companion in its engagement with the question of Black identity and freedom in mid-century America, in a satirical rather than existentialist mode. - 7Buy
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin·1953·Baldwin's debut — published the same year as The Outsider; where Wright turns to existentialism, Baldwin turns to the Black church; the two novels are the contrary impulses of 1950s African-American fiction. - 8Buy
The Man Who Lived Underground
Richard Wright·2021·Wright's novella written in 1941-1942 but not published in full until 2021 — the formal companion to The Outsider in Wright's existentialist project; Fred Daniels underground is the precursor to Cross Damon's self-reinvention.
The Outsider — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Outsider about?
The Outsider follows Cross Damon, a Black postal worker in Chicago who is trapped by debts to his former wife and a pregnant girlfriend and who, when a train accident kills another man and Cross's papers are found on the body, seizes the opportunity to fake his own death and start over as a new person. He goes to New York, where he encounters the Communist Party through a Black friend he meets on the train. He becomes enmeshed in the Party's structures, has several people killed (some by his hand, some by his machination), and eventually is himself killed — not by the Party but by one of its members who has realized what Cross is and what he has done. The novel's philosophical argument is conducted through Cross's interior monologue: he has read existentialist philosophy, he believes that freedom is real and unlimited, and the novel traces what happens when a man who truly believes this acts accordingly.
What is the novel's relationship to French existentialism?
Wright wrote The Outsider after moving to Paris in 1947, where he was in regular contact with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. He was reading their work seriously and thinking about how existentialism — a philosophy developed by white Europeans in the aftermath of World War II — applied to the experience of Black Americans, who had lived a form of the existentialist condition (forced to define themselves in a world that denied their humanity, stripped of the conventional supports of identity and community) for centuries. Cross Damon is Wright's attempt to imagine an existentialist hero from the inside of the African-American experience. The novel's engagement with Camus's The Stranger (1942) and Sartre's Nausea (1938) is explicit: Cross quotes philosophy, thinks in philosophical terms, and his experiment in radical freedom is a literary-philosophical argument with these European predecessors about what freedom means.
How does The Outsider compare to Wright's other work?
The Outsider is Wright's most ambitious novel and his most explicitly philosophical — it is the work in which he makes his intellectual engagement with postwar European thought most visible. Native Son (1940) is social realism in the naturalist tradition of Dreiser and Zola; The Outsider is existentialist fiction in the mode of Camus and Sartre. This shift was controversial: critics who had admired Native Son found The Outsider too abstract, too philosophical, too interested in ideas at the expense of social specificity. The novel was not well received on publication and has been somewhat undervalued since. But it is essential to understanding Wright's development as a thinker, and it is one of the most serious attempts in American fiction to think through the philosophical implications of Black American experience.
What is the significance of Cross Damon's self-reinvention?
Cross's ability to fake his death and reinvent himself is not just a plot device — it is a thought experiment about the existentialist proposition that identity is not fixed, that a person can choose who they are. The question the novel asks is: what would actually happen if a person could do this? Could you leave your history and your obligations and start fresh? Wright's answer is: no, not really, and not because of external constraints but because of internal ones. Cross reinvents himself and finds that he carries his psychology with him, that the violence and the isolation he experiences in his new life are functions of his character and not of his circumstances. The freedom turns out to be not a liberation but a nightmare — the nightmare of total autonomy, which turns out to mean total isolation and total moral responsibility without any of the communal supports that make moral responsibility possible.
What should I read after The Outsider?
After The Outsider, Wright's Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) are the essential companions in his oeuvre, and The Man Who Lived Underground (written 1941-42, published complete 2021) is an important related work. For the existentialist tradition The Outsider engages with, Camus's The Stranger and Sartre's Nausea are the most directly relevant. For the African-American novel of ideas, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) is the most important contemporary parallel. For Wright scholarship, Hazel Rowley's Richard Wright: The Life and Times (2001) is the standard biography.
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