This chapter zeroes in on a key figure in public discourse—the public intellectual—to explore how its specific—public—authority—is shaped by the setting in which it appears—the public sphere. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of intellectuals as “a dominated fraction within the dominant class,” it shows how the authority (and thus the potential power) of this group is gauged by tensions between publicness and popularity. But it also complicates these ideas: by turning to the position of the Black public intellectual, exemplarily embodied by the African American celebrity author Richard Wright, and the special demands imposed on this position by the structural inequalities engrained in the public sphere; and by tracking how Wright mastered these demands by sustaining his interlocking position as a leading intellectual and celebrity author by working across different genres and media, many of them explicitly visual and/or autobiographical.