Neglected by scholars for almost thirty years after its publication in 1938, Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children has only recently received the close analysis requisite to a mature understanding of the first major work of an important literary figure. Most con-temporary critical opinion, in an attempt to justly evaluate Wright's initial achievement, has centered on the collection's thematic elements. Thus, James Giles, Dan McCall, and Keneth Kinnamon, among others, perceive in Uncle Tom's Children a progression from individualism to a collective militancy which fights against racial and economic oppression; they suggest that the stories move from the solitary struggles of Big Boy and Brother Mann in" Big Boy Leaves Home" and" Down By the Riverside" to the mass efforts against injustice led by Reverend Taylor and Aunt Sue in" Fire and Cloud" and" Bright and Morning Star," with Silas's heroism in" Long Black Song" serving as a pivotal point between the two major sets. 1 The commentators who treated the selections in Uncle Tom's Children in thematic terms performed a great service in stimulating the study of the work. But even they would agree that much remains to be accomplished to complete a full analysis of the collection. Edwin Burgum, in his 1944 discussion of Wright's book, presented what might be a valuable starting point for the further study of Wright's short fiction when he considered Uncle Tom's Children as depicting a series of tragedies whose protagonists seek to restore in themselves a sense of psychological equilibrium and unity. 2 Unfortunately, although Burgum argued the value of such an approach in relationship to Wright's collection, his presentation did not delve as deeply into the problem as it might have done, leaving many of the stories unexamined and many critical questions unchallenged. Wright's first book contains unquestionably tragic elements which have been for the most part overlooked, or at least not discussed systematically, in the modern critical corpus concerning Wright's art. A close examination of the stories in Uncle Tom's Children should illustrate their tragic patterns and render some of the work's problem areas more comprehensible by sharpening the critical perception of its overall tragic dimensions. Before a discussion of the tragic patterns in the pieces, it must be made clear what a contemporary tragedy is and what it is not, what operating principles it follows, how one can distinguish it from any story with an" unhappy ending." Such explanations may at first glance seem superfluous, but in view of the awesome divergence of opinion relating to a proper definition of" tragedy," it seems appropriate to examine the assumptions out of which the present consideration of Uncle Tom's Children evolved. The classical dictum pronounced by Aristotle and his successors that a tragedy must depict the fall of a noble personage from a" high estate" to a low estate is probably to be discounted in modern literature. Since there simply are not kings and princes enough to provide tragic subjects in today's society, from practical if not purely philosophic reasons, a tragic protagonist may be a person of" low rank." Still, however, other classical observations on tragedy seem to remain relevant for contemporary art, especially those which involve tragic character, action, and imagery. The tragic hero must, from whatever relative heights or depths he proceeds," fall" during the course of a tragic development; his situation at the conclusion of the tragedy should be worse than it is at the beginning. The protagonist must suffer (death is usually the culmination of this suffering, but it need not be, as the plot of Oedipus Rex demonstrates), and he must …