Overview

Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance--a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. 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."" The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness 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 made 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 years later, his words continue to reverberate.

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9781094131962

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Reviews

In this poignant and disturbing book, one of the most gifted of America's younger writers turns from fiction to tell the story of his own life during the nineteen years he lived in the South. -- New York Times

In this poignant and disturbing book one of the most gifted of America's younger writers turns from fiction to tell the story of his own life during the nineteen years he lived in the South. -- New York Times

Author Information

Richard Wright won international renown for his powerful and visceral depiction of the black experience. He stands today alongside such African-American luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and two of his novels, Native Son and Black Boy, are required reading in high schools and colleges across the nation. He died in 1960. Peter Francis James has starred in numerous Broadway and off-Broadway productions, as well as on such television programs as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, New York Undercover and State of Affairs.

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