Richard Wright, angry isolato, Communist Captain, and expatriate, first from the South and then from America, seems in many ways an unlikely writer to associate with Ellison's pronouncement. A more obvious candidate would be his old literary nemesis, Zora Neale Hurston, who built her narratives on leisurely pastoral, bright bolts of black music and folklore, dance, and a cornucopia of humor. Wright, in his rage, generally grim tone, and driven prose, seems diametrically opposed to the folk narrative in his moods and objectives. But many of our conceptions about Wright stem from an overconcentration on his angry, neo-gothic urban masterwork, Native Son. He could, and did, use folk materials to lend vitality to his realism, to ground his reinscriptions of memory and history, and to introduce his gospel of Communist brotherhood and struggle. Indeed, the book that preceded Native Son, Uncle Tom's Children, a sequence of short stories/novellas, commences in “Big Boy Leaves Home” with disembodied voices of the folk: