from Black Boy

by Richard Wright

BEFORE READING

Background

Although mostly self-educated, Richard Wright was one of the first African-American writers to gain national recognition as a novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist. Born on a plantation in rural Mississippi, young Richard wasn't allowed to take books from the "whites only" library. To read the works of H. L. Mencken, for example, he would forge a note from a white library cardholder: "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?" This unfair system failed to stop Wright from reading the works of authors that would later influence his writings, including Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser.

Wright's Black Boy is an autobiography that describes the hardships of his upbringing in the South and his later move to the difficult life of urban Chicago. Many critics consider Black Boy to be Wright's greatest work. It conveys the painful life of an African-American boy lost in a brutal American environment while infusing themes and ideas found in Marx, Freud, Joyce, Nehru, Dostoyevsky, and others. The work not only describes the gritty details of abandonment, poverty, violence, and prejudice, but it realistically depicts the way that many African Americans seemed to accept their "place" in white society. At the center of it all is the narrator, a sensitive young black boy in search of strength and identity in a difficult environment.

by Richard Wright (1908-1960), African-American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, was born near Natchez, Mississippi. His family moved often, making a consistent education difficult for Wright, whose official schooling ended when he was 15.

He moved to Chicago in the late 1920s, working as a clerk in the U.S. Post Office. He joined the Communist Party in 1932. Disillusioned with what he considered the party's narrow focus and rejection of new approaches and ideas, he resigned in 1944. He married Rose Dhima Meadman in 1938 and later divorced. In 1941 he married Ellen Poplar and had two daughters.

Wright's association with the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers Project in Chicago led to his rise as an important American author. His collection of four stories depicting the life of a black Communist won a $500 first prize from Story magazine. These later were published as Uncle Tom's Children. Wright received critical acclaim and a Guggenheim fellowship for his work, but resolved to write a book that hit with real force. That book was Native Son (1940), a groundbreaking work that depicted Bigger Thomas, an African-American who murders two people and is condemned to death. The focus of much critical discussion, Native Son shows Bigger to be a terrible product of his environment, and gives the reader reader an insight into the life of a man who feels powerless and afraid in white society.

Wright went on to publish a variety of works, including Twelve Million Black Vocies: A Folk History of the Negro in the U.S. (1941) and Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945). He moved to Paris and continued to write, publishing works such as The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954), The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1954), White Man Listen! (1957), The Long Dream (1958), and Eight Men (short stories, 1961). After his death from a heart attack in 1960, he was buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, a resting place for some of history's most famous artists. American Hunger (1977), the continuation of his autobiography Black Boy, was published after his death, as were Lawd Today (1963) and The Man Who Lived Underground (1971).

1. ardently—eagerly; passionately.

2. copiously—plentifully, much.

3. jauntily—light-heartedly.

4. dingy—shabby.

5. flat—apartment.

6. mulatto—person of mixed black and white ancestry.

7. blotter—piece of absorbent paper used to dry a surface

     freshly written on in ink.

8. sharecropper—tenant farmer; one who works land and in return

     receives a portion of the crop.

9. restless—marked by a lack of quiet, repose, or rest.

10. agony—the suffering of intense physical or mental pain.

DURING READING

Use the STUDY GUIDE below as a way to work through the selection and improve your comprehension of the essay.

AFTER READING

Answer the Questions to Consider questions in the book as a way to deepen your interpretation of the selection.

1. Why do you think the judge accepted the father's word that he was doing all he could?

2. How would you describe the relationship between Wright and his father?

3. To what degree does Wright blame his father's shortcomings on the oppression of a society dominated by whites?

4. Why do you think the narrator stopped seeing the policeman interviewing him as "white"?

Bibliography

Uncle Tom's Children(1938)

Native Son (1940)

Twelve Million Black Vocies: A Folk History of the Negro in the U.S. (1941)

Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945)

The Outsider (1953)

Savage Holiday (1954)

Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954)

The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956)

White Man Listen! (1957)

The Long Dream (1958)

Eight Men (short stories, 1961)

Lawd Today (1963)

The Man Who Lived Underground (1971)

American Hunger (1977)

James Baldwin. Notes of a Native Son (1955). A powerful African-American prose writer explains to 1950s white America what it means to be an urban black.

Claude Brown. Manchild in the Promised Land (1965). Autobiography of a young man who escaped the Harlem ghetto, gang wars, and prison to enter law school.

Frederick Douglass. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). The life story of the self-educated ex-slave who became a famous lecturer of the abolitionist movement.

W.E.B. DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk (1903). An African-American historian, sociologist, educator, and abolitionist explores the souls of blacks in nineteenth-century America.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Why We Can't Wait (1964). One of five books in which the great Civil Rights leader explains his approach to achieving racial justice in America.

Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). The life story of an influential Black Muslim leader of the mid- to late-1960s.

Alice Moody. Coming of Age in Mississippi (1969). A candid memoir of a young Mississippi woman's experience in the Civil Rights movement.

Toni Morrison. Jazz (1992). A lyrical, improvisational story of black life in 1920s New York City by the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Alice Walker. The Color Purple (1982). A best-selling, Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a prolific fiction writer and women's advocate, the daughter of Georgia sharecroppers.

Richard Wright. Native Son (1940). A searing novel of the World War II era, by an African-American author who influenced many later writers.