The existence of Bigger across racial lines enabled Wright both to come to terms with the limitations of black American culture, of which he would write with almost abusive force in his autobiography Black Boy, and to set the problems facing blacks alongside those facing whites and thus allow a reciprocity of interest and influence that he had never guessed at in his youth. Nevertheless, the task of representing Bigger in fiction remained daunting. Unlike the dogmatic Communist ideology Wright was in the process of repudiating, the social and political criticism implicit in these marginal
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