Abstract

Though, generally, it is often suggested that Richard Wright's The Outsider (1953) explicitly carries the label of an existentialist novel, Savage Holiday (1954) and The Long Dream (1958) are also invested in Wright’s approach to existentialism, since all three novels represent Wright’s attempts to translate Sartre’s French existentialism into Wright’s understanding of what a black existentialism would look like. That translation, for Wright, is not just about interpreted his meaning of “existence in black” through Sartre’s “being,” or even about Wright appropriating Sartre’s equivalency of existentialism with humanism, but, instead, it is much more about Wright attempting to confront Heidegger’s “Dasein” more directly.