Black Boy
| Black Boy | |
|---|---|
 1st edition |
|
| Author(s) | Richard Wright |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Autobiography, Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Harper & Brothers |
| Publication date | 1945 |
| Media type | Paperback |
| Pages | 419 p. |
| ISBN | 0-06-113024-9 |
| OCLC Number | 94572252 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.52 B 22 |
| LC Classification | 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 an autobiography by Richard Wright.[1] The author explores his childhood, race relations in the South, and his eventual move to Chicago, where he establishes his writing career and becomes involved with the Communist Party.
Contents |
Plot summary[edit]
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 grandmothers' 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 even more out of place as he grows older and comes in contact with the rampant racism of the 1920s south. Not only he finds it generally unjust but also he is especially bothered by whites' and other blacks' desire to squash his intellectual curiosity and potential.
His father deserts the family, and he is shuffled back and forth between his sick mother, his fanatically religious grandmother and various aunts and uncles. As he ventures into the white world to find jobs, he encounters extreme racism and brutal violence, which stays with him the rest of his life. The family is starving to death. They have always viewed the north as a place of opportunity, and 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. Richard, many times, has to do things that he does not want to do, in order to survive.
He 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, and his mother is crippled by a stroke, and his relatives continue to annoy him about his atheism and his reading. They see no point of it. He finds a job at the post office and meets some 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.
At first, he thinks he will find friends within the party, especially among its black members, but he finds them to be just as afraid of change as the southern whites he had left behind. The Communists fear anyone who disagrees with their ideas, and Wright, who has always been inclined to question and speak his mind, is quickly branded a "counter-revolutionary." When he tries to leave the party, he is accused of trying to lead others away from it.
After witnessing the trial of another black Communist for counter-revolutionary activity, Wright decides to abandon the party. He remains branded an "enemy" of Communism, and party members threaten him away from various jobs and gatherings. Nevertheless, he does not fight them because he believes they are clumsily groping toward ideas that he agrees with: unity, tolerance, and equality. He ends the book by resolving to use his writing to search for a way to start a revolution: he thinks that everyone has a "hunger" for life that needs to be filled, and for him, writing is his way to the human heart.
Publishing history[edit]
The entire manuscript was written during 1943 under the working title "Black Confession." By December, when Wright delivered the book to his agent, he had changed the title to "American Hunger." The first fourteen chapters, about his Mississippi childhood were called "Part One: Southern Night," and the last six, about Chicago, were "Part Two: The Horror and the Glory." In January 1944, Harper and Brothers accepted all twenty chapters, and by May they were all in page proofs for a scheduled fall publication of the book. In June, the Book of the Month Club expressed an interest in only the Mississippi childhood section, the first fourteen chapters.
In response, Wright agreed to eliminate the Chicago section, and in August he renamed the shortened book Black Boy. Harper and Brothers published it under that title in 1945, and it sold 195,000 retail copies in its first edition and 351,000 copies through the Book-of-the-Month Club.[2]
Parts of the Chicago chapters were published during Wright's lifetime as magazine articles, but the six chapters were first published together in 1977, posthumously, by Harper and Row, as American Hunger. In 1991, all twenty chapters were published together for the first time, as Wright had originally intended, by the Library of America. The new title was Black Boy (American Hunger).[2]
The Book of the Month Club played an important role in Wright's career. His 1940 novel Native Son was the first Book of the Month Club selection written by an African-American,[3] and Wright was willing to change the book to get this second endorsement. However, he wrote in his journal that the Book of the Month Club had yielded to pressure from the Communist Party in asking him to eliminate the chapters that dealt with his membership in and disillusionment with Communism.[2]
References[edit]
- ^ Eleanor Blau (28 August 1991). "The Works of Richard Wright, as Written". The New York Times.
- ^ a b c Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., "Note on the Text," pp 407–8 in Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger), The Library of America, 1993.
- ^ Mitgang, Herbert. "Books of the Times; An American Master and New Discoveries." The New York Times 1 January 1992. Accessed on 14 May 2006.[1].
