James Campbell’s books include Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank, and Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin, both recently reissued.
“How can I have seemed so settled in my opinions? So smug in my attitudes?”
In the spring of 1960, the year of his death, the novelist Richard Wright wrote from Paris to his friend and Dutch translator Margrit de Sablonière: