Black Boy
First edition
|
|
| Author | Richard Wright |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Autobiography, Non-fiction |
| Published | 1945 Harper & Brothers |
| Media type | Paperback |
| Pages | 419 p. |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 94572252 |
| 813/.52 B 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3545.R815 Z96 2006 |
| Preceded by | 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States |
| Followed by | The Outsider |
Black Boy (1945) is a memoir by American author Richard Wright, detailing his youth in the South: Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and his eventual move to Chicago, where he establishes his writing career and becomes involved with the Communist Party in the United States.
Black Boy (American Hunger) is a memoir of Richard Wright's childhood and young adulthood. It is split into two sections, "Southern Night" (concerning his childhood in the south) and "The Horror and the Glory" (concerning his early adult years in Chicago).
The book begins with a mischievous four-year-old Wright setting fire to his grandmother's house and continues in that vein. Wright is a curious child living in a household of strict, religious women and violent, irresponsible men. He quickly chafes against his surroundings, reading instead of playing with other children, and rejecting the church in favor of atheism at a young age. He feels more out of place as he grows older and comes in contact with the Jim Crow racism of the 1920s South. He finds it generally unjust and fights against whites' and other blacks' desire to squash his intellectual curiosity and potential.
After his father deserts the family, young Wright is shuffled back and forth among his sick mother, his fanatically religious grandmother, and various maternal aunts and uncles. As he ventures into the white world to find jobs, he encounters extreme racism and brutal violence, experience which stays with him the rest of his life. The family is starving. They have always viewed the North as a place of opportunity, so as soon as they can scrape together enough money, Richard and his aunt go to Chicago, promising to send for his mother and brother. But before Richard can go to Chicago, he has to resort to stealing money and lying. Many times he must do things he does not want to do, for survival.
The youth finds the North less racist than the South and begins forming concrete ideas about American race relations. He holds many jobs, most of them menial. He washes floors during the day and reads Proust and medical journals by night. His family is still very poor, his mother is crippled by a stroke, and his relatives constantly annoy him about his atheism and his "pointless" reading. He finds a job at the post office and meets white men who share his cynical view of the world and religion in particular. They invite him to the John Reed Club, an organization that promotes the arts and social change. He becomes involved with a magazine called Left Front. He slowly becomes immersed in the Communist Party, organizing its writers and artists.
...
Wikipedia