Best Selling Books by Richard Wright

From dusty rural villages to northern ghettos, 12 Million Black Voices is an unflinching portrayal of the lives that many black Americans lived in the 1930s. It is a testament to the strength of black communities throughout America.

"Four novellas about southern negroes and whites." Cf. Hanna, A. Mirror for the nation

The library of America is dedicated to publishing America''s best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made" (The New Republic), Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now, with exactly one hundred volumes to choose from, there is a perfect gift for everyone.

These inspirational meditations, prayers, and stories are written by an Ojibwe Elder and alcohol and drug counselor to speak with clarity, wisdom, and care about the everyday experience of recovery. The author combines Ojibwe and Twelve Step spiritual principles and practices with stories from Indians at all stages of recovery to help readers navigate the challenges and rewards of living sober. Each of this book’s 52 meditations includes a short reflection, a related story "from the rooms" of AA, and seven prayers—one for every day of the week. Grounded in reliance on the Creator, the wisdom of Elders, and the support of the sober community, this unique collection is intended to provide daily strength and hope for the recovery journey and counteract the harsh realities of poverty, violence, and broken relationships that are too often fueled by alcohol and other drug use. Readers will recognize the value of spiritual laws like Honesty, Sharing, Kindness, and Strength as well as the power of traditional rituals such as offering tobacco with prayers. Whatever our culture, we can apply this book’s wisdom to our recovery and life.

The excerpts featured in this free sampler come from some of our most popular nonfiction books for middle and high school classrooms—making them ideal choices to meet the new Common Core Standards for the English Language Arts. From the primary documents of The American Reader to The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind—the story of young man from an impoverished African village who built a windmill to bring life-changing electricity to his community—these books will take students across time periods and around the world. They''ll grapple with complex ideas and meet people from the past and present who will inspire them. Along the way, your students will come to understand the components of critical thinking and good writing—and why they matter.

This ethnography of teenage suburban drug dealers "provides a fascinating and powerful counterpoint to the devastation of the drug war" (Alice Goffman, author of On the Run). When we think about young people dealing drugs, we tend to picture it happening in disadvantaged, crime-ridden, urban neighborhoods. But drugs are used everywhere. And teenage users in the suburbs tend to buy drugs from their peers, dealers who have their own culture and code, distinct from their urban counterparts. In Code of the Suburb, Scott Jacques and Richard Wright offer a fascinating ethnography of the culture of suburban drug dealers. Drawing on fieldwork among teens in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, they carefully parse the complicated code that governs relationships among buyers, sellers, police, and other suburbanites. That code differs from the one followed by urban drug dealers in one crucial respect: whereas urban drug dealers see violent vengeance as crucial to status and security, the opposite is true for their suburban counterparts. As Jacques and Wright show, suburban drug dealers accord status to deliberate avoidance of conflict, which helps keep their drug markets more peaceful—and, consequently, less likely to be noticed by law enforcement.

Nineteen fifteen. The resurgent Ku Klux Klan met on Stone Mountain in Georgia for its first-ever cross burning. Fifty-six blacks were reported lynched. Nineteen twenty-three. Half a million blacks migrated into Northern cites with false hopes of better times in the nation''s factories. Nineteen twenty-nine. The stock market crashed. Soon more than a quarter of all blacks were unemployed. Nineteen thirty-three. Under the New Deal, the segregated Civilian Conservation Corps put 200,000 black teenagers to work. Nineteen forty. Richard Wright''s Native Son outsells John Steinbeck''s The Grapes of Wrath to become number one on the best-seller list. 12 Million Black Voices, first published in 1941, brilliantly captures the lives of black people in America during the early twentieth century by combining the powerful prose of Richard Wright with startling photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam from the Farm Security Administration files compiled during the Great Depression. From crowded, run-down farm shacks to Harlem storefront churches, the photographs ? by giants like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, & Arthur Rothstein ? poignantly depict the lives of black people while the accompanying text eloquently narrates the story of the pictures & delivers a powerful commentary on the origins & history of black oppression in this country.