Customer Reviews

Richard Wright : Later Works: Black Boy (American Hunger), The Outsider

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Black Boy (American Hunger) serves as a the real life basis for the novels in the first volume of this collection. It relates Wright's experiences growing up in the south and gradually moving north, ultimately to Chicago. It's fascinating and completely believable and really points out the absurdities of racism and Jim Crow-ism, as well as the coldness of the northerners. The Outsider is a departure from much of Wright's other work. While about a black character, it is essentially a musing on the intellectual and physical power one has, and their ability to wield it undetected, as long as they fit into another's stereotypes. It is quite different and doesn't focus on cruelly racist treatment. It is one of the few times in which the protagonist is comfortable and confident in his surroundings. Black Boy (American Hunger) is one of the best autobiographies ever and The Outsider is a clever story with some brilliant twists on Wright's traditional and more well-known works.

I've only read the first part of Black Boy, the part dealing with Wright's life in the south, but it is so incredibly moving that I had to say something now before I proceed with the rest of this book and move on to the other Library of America book and possibly others by Wright.

I've read several other books, fiction and nonfiction about life in the south during Jim Crow times, but never anything so real and immediate and moving. i recommend this book without reservation. I would love to see a review here by a black man my ago or so (I'm 59) to hear his opinions or insights on this book, not to get the final word on black opinion but to be goaded deeper into the reality that this book reveals. Please read it.

Library of America's 1991 second volume of an incomplete Richard Wright edition united for the first time in print the two parts of Wright's memoirs. The book's original title had been American Hunger. When it came out in a book club edition in 1945, its second part was omitted. The first part was published as Black Boy.
The second part was meant to be called The Horror and the Glory. It was first published as a book in 1977. Analyzing the reasons for publishing decisions taken at various steps would make a new book again.

Racism and bigotry are the main subjects of this autobiography. Its strength is less in its language or story, than in its reflections and implications.

In part 1, the childhood of a little boy in a family without father, with a sick mother, and with insensitive grandparents, aunts and uncles, is full of essential bleakness. Poverty was bad, hunger was real, and it was aggravated by nearly no formal schooling, by religious rigidity, of a kind that the boy could not buy into. Domestic violence was also part of the mix.
The boy grew up amidst deeply rooted racism. His mind, like that of his friends in the streets, is filled with hatred. Race relations seem beyond repair. It is hard to see any potential for an improvement of the attitudes of both sides. Social interaction is based on contempt, subservience, dishonesty and violence.

He develops intellectual curiosity during puberty and separates himself mentally from his relatives. He becomes a voracious but undiscriminating reader. His reluctance to play along in religious matters and his crazy idea to write stories make him an early outsider. He starts reading serious things and has dreams of becoming a professional man.
Part 1 ends on an optimistic note with Richard on a train leaving Memphis for Chicago, at age 19.

In Chicago, Richard finds it hard to adjust to a different world, to shed the distrust, which was so essential for survival in the south. In a way, humanity is redeemed, as crass racism of the Jim Crow kind is absent, but society condemns itself in other ways. Depression is coming. R finds American emptiness: the national character is too superficially optimistic in his view.
`If the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion.' (Would that be a prophecy of current political divisions?)
A lust for trash blinds the nation, he observes.

R finds various jobs, like postal clerk and insurance agent. He gets by. He gets involved with a leftist cultural organization, the John Reed Club, which pulls him into the Communist Party. These are years of show trials in Moscow, and R finds himself accused as a Trotzky-ist soon enough. He observes a Chicago version of a show trial. The party has no time for independent thought. He realizes that he would be shot if the party were in power.

The book ends with an isolated black intellectual's search for his way.
`I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say.'

Third part badly needed. Alas, it wasn't written.

Obviously, RW could not fit in. Reactions to the book, had it been published then, would have been divided in four groups: some would condemn him for being a communist (and condemn his pictures of racism as communist propaganda). The communists would condemn him for being their enemy. Some curious readers would have been interested in his predicament, which is so well known from other communist deserters, Koestler foremost. A majority would have been left untouched.

The combined memoirs have in the meantime also been published as a separate book under the title Black Boy. That is the same title as part 1, hence I cannot publish this review at its proper place, but have to use the LoA edition which also includes The Outsider, a later novel. I will review the Outsider, his later novel that is also included here, later.

My second reading of Richard Wright's Black Boy, coming some 40 years after my first, was a much different experience than I expected it to be. I probably should not have been surprised because I am not, of course, the same person I was four decades ago when I first read of Wright's struggles to survive the Jim Crow South as a young black man with an "attitude problem." However, more importantly, the text I read in the late sixties did not include Wright's complete manuscript.

The Library of America edition I read this time includes an additional six chapters (some 117 pages) under the subtitle "Part Two: The Horror and the Glory." In this section of the book, Wright describes his arrival in Chicago and his flirtation with the American Communist Party. This new section of Wright's autobiography does offer new insight into his life and politics but, frankly, it lessens the overall impact of Black Boy. The book is much more powerful with its original open-ended final words than it is with the detailed revelations pertaining to the silliness and incompetence of Chicago's Communist party.

"Part One: Southern Night," particularly as it pertains to Wright's early boyhood, is fascinating. A portion of one paragraph on page 192, for instance, in which Wright addresses the ever-present tension he lived with, is unforgettable:

"I did not know when I would be thrown into a situation where I would say the wrong word to the wrong white man and find myself in trouble. And, above all, I wanted to avoid trouble, for I feared that if I clashed with whites I would lose control of my emotions and spill out words that would be my sentence of death. Time was not on my side and I had to make some move."

Wright, an exceptionally bright child despite getting a slow start to any kind of formal education, had two strikes against him from the beginning. Strike one was his geographic location - he grew up in the heart of Mississippi when Jim Crow was still king. Strike two was that Wright was part of such a deeply conservatively religious extended family that he was not allowed to read much other than the Bible. His maternal grandmother believed all fiction to be the devil's work and severely punished Wright if he dared expose himself to it.

What Richard Wright accomplished despite these handicaps is striking. Physical survival was not a given in the American South of those days for young black men as outspoken as Wright. That he did survive, and that he accomplished as much as he did, is inspirational. Black Boy deserves to be considered an American classic even in this complete version, but I believe that it is a better book as originally published.