Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine
One of the most prominent African-American writers of the 20th century, Richard Wright illuminated and defined midcentury discussions of race in America. Black Boy, his coming-of-age autobiography published in 1945, is divided into two parts: “Southern Night” traces his violent childhood in the segregated South as he grapples with religion, bigotry and family tragedy; “The Horror and the Glory” follows him through young adulthood, his move to Chicago and his initiation into the Communist Party during the Great Depression. Wright soon became disenchanted with the party’s inertia and interparty politics, and he left the fold in 1942. But he held onto his idealistic belief in writing as a vehicle for change — a belief that powers Black Boy, which uses novelistic techniques to chart a young writer’s journey into manhood.
This influential memoir of a rebellious southern boyhood vividly evokes the struggle for African American identity in the decades before civil rights
Robert McCrum Monday 3 Octuber 2016
Great coming-of-age memoirs have a potency rare in literature, and can be just as influential as great novels. Richard Wright, outstanding in both genres, was an important 20th-century African American writer, renowned for his 1940 novel, Native Son. Together with Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, Wright was crucial in forging an authentic literary consciousness for the black community as it struggled to escape decades of oppression after the civil war.
The bestselling Black Boy, published in 1945 (its original title had been Black Confession), explored the background to Native Son, but was also a visceral and unforgettable account of a young black man’s coming of age in the American south in the bitter decades before the civil rights movement.
Full of vivid scenes and arresting vignettes, it begins with four-year-old Richard (“angry, fretful and impatient”) setting fire to the family home, a brilliant opening that establishes young Wright as a fiery protagonist. Indeed, he presents himself throughout Black Boy as a rebel, at odds with both his ailing mother, his faithless, improvident father and tyrannical “Granny”. After the fire, the Wright family headed to Memphis, Tennessee where they lived in “a brick tenement”.
Young Richard goes to school; his father deserts the family and his sons are put into care. Eventually, they move to Arkansas, where Wright broods on “the cultural barrenness of black life”. For him, however, there is not even the consolation of religion. He’s an atheist. In church, when his fellows sing: “Amazing grace, how sweet it sounds”, he is humming under his breath: “A bulldog ran my grandma down.”
Slowly, Wright’s mature character formed itself: “At the age of 12 I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me sceptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical.”
This lifelong spirit, he writes, “made me love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim the whole of men’s souls.”
Thus driven, and to escape the shocking racism of the south, it becomes his ambition to head north to Chicago as soon as he can afford the trip. But first, he must start out in life as a young black man in Memphis.
The first half of Wright’s “confession” is set exclusively in the south; the second part, describing his Chicago experiences, entitled The Horror and the Glory, was originally part of a longer book with the working title American Hunger. For various commercial considerations, Wright’s publishers requested that he focus on his Mississippi childhood and drop the final (Chicago) chapters. American Hunger became Black Boy, and would not be published with all parts fully restored until 1991, when the Library of America issued Black Boy (American Hunger).
The British, Vintage edition, though incomplete, is faithful to the 1945 edition. It subtly mythologises Wright’s African American upbringing and fearlessly confronts southern racism. For Wright, coming of age was all to do with claiming and celebrating his identity as a black man. The south, he declared, in a fierce passage, had only allowed him “to be natural, to be real, to be myself” through a negative form of self-expression, “in rejection, rebellion, and aggression”. He continues:
‘Men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame’: Richard Wright.
The white south said that it knew ‘niggers’, and I was what the white south called a ‘nigger’. Well, the white south had never known me – never known what I thought, what I felt. The white south said I had a ‘place’ in life. Well, I had never felt my ‘place’; or, rather, my deepest instincts had always made me reject the ‘place’ to which the white south had assigned me. It had never occurred to me that I was in any way an inferior being.
As a youngster in small-town Jackson, Wright knew only too well what it meant to be a “nigger”, a second-class citizen. He worked as a porter in a clothing store; next he worked for an optician; then he moved to a drugstore, sweeping the sidewalk. But he had a fundamental problem. He “could not make subservience an automatic part of my behaviour”.
Finally, in November 1925, he arrived back in Memphis. This was not Chicago (a journey he could not yet afford), but it was a start. He began to read, educating himself by studying the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Here, he stumbled on the work of HL Mencken, and had his Damascene moment:
Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons?
Indeed they could. Better still, Mencken was introducing the young writer to a new world: Spinoza, Gustave Flaubert, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, TS Eliot, and many more. “Were these men real? And how did one pronounce their names?” Wright was hooked. Soon after this, he set off for Chicago:
I was leaving without a qualm, without a single backward glance. The face of the south I had known was hostile and forbidding, and yet out of all the conflicts and the curses… I had somehow gotten the idea that life could be different, could be lived in a fuller and richer manner... If I could meet enough of a different life, then, perhaps, gradually and slowly I might learn who I was, what I might be.
Wright’s closing words evoke the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, making a surprising and unexpected link between himself and Martin Luther King. He has, he writes, “a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled here beneath the stars.”
A signature sentence
“A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when I saw my father sitting with the strange woman and the time when I was to see him again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a share-cropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands – a quarter of a century during which my mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I tried to talk to him I realised that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there were echoes of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly different planes of reality.” (page 32)
Richard wright, the father figure of African American literature, both nurtured and was rejected by his two most conspicuous heirs, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Wright, who took Ellison under his wing in New York in the late 1930s, told his acolyte to stop copying him, that he was mimicking, not cultivating his own style. Ellison responded that he was trying to learn to write well by imitating his mentor. That was when they were close. Baldwin, too, started out as a pupil and an admirer who saw Wright poised to be the greatest Black writer in the United States.
The book that entered the New York Times Best Sellers list 80 years after it was written
“Might very well be Wright’s most brilliantly crafted, and ominously foretelling, book.” — Kiese Laymon
“The power and pain of Wright’s writing are evident in this wrenching novel. . . . Wright makes the impact of racist policing palpable as the story builds to a gut-punch ending, and the inclusion of his essay ‘Memories of My Grandmother’ illuminates his inspiration for the book. This nightmarish tale of racist terror resonates.” — Publishers Weekly
For a century or more, a general boycott prevailed whereby America’s great colleges and universities refused to even consider the appointment of a black person to their faculties.
Richard Wright, who would have been 100 years old this year, was, arguably, the most influential African-American writer of the twentieth century. He stood astride the midsection of that century as a battering ram, paving the way for the black writers who followed him: Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, John Williams. Today, 48 years after his death, his legacy remains strong; his daughter, Julia Wright, is helping to keep it alive. She succeeded in getting HarperCollins to publish the unfinished novel her father was working on in the weeks before his death. It was published in January under the title, A Father’s Law. And she will host a series of seminars this year that will discuss her father’s work.
Richard Wright: The Library of America Unexpurgated Edition (boxed set)
Lawd Today! | Uncle Tom’s Children | Native Son | Black Boy (American Hunger) | The Outsider
Edited by Arnold Rampersad
Now in a boxed set, the definitive edition of Richard Wright’s landmark works in the form in which he intended them to be read.
“With the appearance of the two-volume Richard Wright: Works, published by The Library of America and edited and annotated by Arnold Rampersad, we have a new opportunity to assess Wright’s formidable and lasting contribution to American literature. But this time we have texts intended as the author originally wished them to be read. The works that millions know are, as it turns out, expurged and abbreviated versions of what Wright submitted for publication.” — Charles Johnson, The Chicago Tribune
On April 20, some eighty years after it was first written, Library of America will release Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, a previously unpublished novel about race and police violence by one of the most influential African American writers of the last century.
The author of Native Son wrote another damning book about race that was rejected by publishers at the time – but now it’s finally seeing the light of day
David Smith Thursday 22 April 2021
He was one of most influential African American writers of the 20th century. But Richard Wright found it hard to talk to his daughter about race.
“It’s like soldiers who go to war and then come back,” Julia Wright, who turns 79 this year, says in a phone interview with the Guardian. “They don’t always find the way to share what they did at war with their family. My father didn’t really know how to share the pain about race with me.
Just over a year after the author Richard Wright published his first novel, Native Son, in March 1940, the text was adapted for the first time. In March 1941, Wright and the playwright Paul Green staged a contentious, Orson Welles–directed production at New York’s St. James Theatre. Ten years later, Wright played his own protagonist in an unfortunate Argentinian film adaptation, Sangre negra (“black blood”). By 2014, there had been yet another Native Son film and two more plays.
I first read Native Son in college. (That’s my copy in the photo.) And while I know I read it – there are highlights, notes and scribbles clearly in my handwriting – I remember very little of that reading. And maybe that’s a good thing. Reading Native Son today brings a whole new level of context. But let’s wait on that for now.
