A special Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition of Richard Wright's powerful
account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow
South--a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human
suffering
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 headed 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." More than seventy-five years later, his words continue to
reverberate.
One of the great American memoirs, Wright's account is a deeply moving
record of struggle and endurance--a seminal literary work that
illuminates our own time.
