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Richard Wright

Black Boy

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A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson.
When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.”
Wright’s once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he may his way north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.” Seventy-five year later, his words continue to reverberate. “To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness,” John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. “Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear.”
One of the great American memoirs, Wright’s account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance—a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time.
This book is currently unavailable
533 printed pages
Publication year
2020
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Impressions

  • Rita Volkinshteinshared an impression8 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🚀Unputdownable

    This book has been a revelation for me. It opened a new world, some of it maybe once known to me, but forgotten. I think this is the first book by a black writer I have ever read. Thank you for a great experience! I am hungry for more Richard Wright books.

  • ht21345678shared an impression8 years ago
    👍Worth reading

    Richard struggles in front of crowds, though he is smart and knows it

  • Paablo Renatoshared an impression6 years ago
    👍Worth reading

    I love this book , I have read over and over . My best of all time

Quotes

  • patrickpolus10has quoted8 years ago
    said.
    I wanted to reach for the blotter and succeeded only in twitching my arm.
    “Here,” she said sharply, reaching for the blotter and shoving it into my fingers.
    She wrote in ink on an envelope and pushed it toward me. Holding the blotter in my hand, I stared at the envelope and could not move.
    “Blot it,” she said.
    I could not lift my hand. I knew what she had said; I knew what she wanted me to do; and I had heard her correctly. I wanted to look at her
  • refatbarihas quoted8 years ago
    ard and the instant his hand left me I jumped to my feet and broke into a wild run, trying to elude the people who surrounded me, heading for the street. I was caught before I had gone ten paces.
    From that moment on things became tangled for me.
  • A.A. ABDULKAREEMhas quoted5 years ago
    Wright was nearly six years dead when Miss Crawford—a thin, short woman with eyeglasses and a warm nature—gave us the books, but his death and his life and his work meant nothing to me that afternoon.

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