Charles Wright, 76; NYC novelist wrote of black street life

NEW YORK - Charles Wright, who wrote three auto- biographical novels about black street life in New York City between 1963 and 1973 that seemed to herald the rise of an important literary talent but who vanished into alcoholism and despair and never published another book, died Oct. 1 in Manhattan. He was 76 and lived in the East Village.

The cause was heart failure, said Jan Hodenfield, one of Mr. Wright's former editors; earlier in the year, he said, Mr. Wright had learned that alcohol had eroded his liver. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, Mr. Wright lived in the spare room of the Brooklyn apartment of Hodenfield and his family.

Mr. Wright's three books were "The Messenger" (1963), "The Wig" (1966), and "Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About" (1973), all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Together they describe a loner's life on the fringes of New York society - his protagonists stand in for himself, working at low-level jobs, living in low-rent apartments, hanging out with lowlife personalities.

"The Messenger" was the best received of the three, perhaps because it told a more universal tale about being an outsider.

"The Wig" is a far angrier effort. "Malevolent, bitter, glittering," critic Conrad Knickerbocker wrote in The New York Times, adding that Mr. Wight's style was "as mean and vicious a weapon as a rusty hacksaw" and that he wielded it against blacks as well as whites.

The book is an occasionally surreal, comic portrait of a black man, Lester Jefferson, who feels he must hide his blackness to achieve the acceptance and material rewards he thinks he deserves.

"Absolutely Nothing," most of which had been previously published in columns that Mr. Wright wrote for The Village Voice, is a chronicle of seedy adventures - as a dishwasher and porter, as a lover, as a drunk - that some critics questioned as self-hating, though others found evocative and disturbing. The three books were republished in a single volume by HarperCollins in 1993.

Charles Stevenson Wright was born in New Franklin, Mo.

By age 14, he was an avid reader and knew he wished to be a writer. He dropped out of high school and spent his days in the library.

According to one story he told the Hodenfield family, he would read magazines in their bound stacks at the railroad station because he knew that once they got to the local drugstore, he would not be allowed in to look at them.