The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at the Beinecke Library is pleased to announce a new podcast: Richard Wright, Native Son, and the Beinecke: Being Brought to My Senses. Jonathan Holloway, Yale Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies recounts visiting the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in his first month of graduate school and the transformative experience that grew out of his surprise encounter with Richard Wright’s landmark text, Native Son. (7:27)

You can listen to and download this podcast free via the Beinecke’s Blogs & Podcasts page and through Yale’s iTunesU web site.

Information about the Richard Wright Papers at the Beinecke Library and related collections can be found online by searching the Library’s Finding Aid Database. Images from the archive are available through the Beinecke’s Digital Library.

Historian Jonathan Holloway is the author of Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941, the editor of Ralph Bunche’s A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership, and the co-editor of the anthology, Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the 20th Century. He is a professor of History at Yale University and in 2005 he became the eleventh master of Calhoun College, one of Yale’s twelve residential colleges.