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Readers have long considered Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's first written and last published novel, an anomaly-when they have considered it at all. The novel, which Wright began perhaps as early as 1933 and which he continued to compose and revise until 1937,1 simply seems inconsistent with our image of what a Wright text of the 1930s, a decade which saw the publication of Wright's radical poetry and the short-story collection Uncle Tom's Children, should do or be. Set in Chicago during the Great Depression, Lawd Today! features petit bourgeois postal worker Jake Jackson as its protagonist. Jake, a drunken, abusive lout who spends his days lusting after prostitutes and beating his wife, never achieves any real revolutionary awakening, and indeed continues to endorse capitalism and the American success myth and to condemn "'Commoonists'" despite his own debt-ridden and fundamentally unsuccessful life. When the small publishing house Walker and Company released the novel posthumously in 1963, critics greeted it with a mixture of confusion, qualified praise, and disgust. Indeed, Nick Aaron Ford, the novel's most vociferous early critic, found this "dull, unimaginative novel" so impossible to reconcile with his vision of Wright that he wrote, "It is difficult to believe that Lawd Today was written by Richard Wright. . . . It is doubtful that the mature Wright ever would have agreed to its publication" (368). Although Ford may have articulated the most extreme critique of the novel, he was by no means completely out of step with his fellow reviewers. Granville Hicks' unenthusiastic comment that "it is less powerful than either Native Son or Black Boy, but it has its own kind of interest" (363) typifies the lukewarm response that continues to guide critical discussion-or the lack thereof-of the novel today, with a few notable exceptions.2 Yoshinobu Hakutani, a more recent Wright critic, claims that few readers can "deny that Lawd Today lacks the tension of Native Son." Although he admires certain satiric elements of the novel, he takes it to task primarily for its failings as a work of naturalistic protest fiction, a la Native Son: "On the one hand, [Wright] has accumulated documentary detail characteristic of a naturalistic style. But his manner is flawed because his selected scenes are imparted with gratuitous metaphors...