Description
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.
Author: Richard Wright
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 04/29/2008
Series: P.S.
Pages: 448
Weight: 0.9lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.60w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780061443084
Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 7.4
Point Value: 22
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 12777 / Black Boy (American Hunger)
About the Author
Wright, Richard: - Richard Wright won international renown for his powerful and visceral depiction of the black experience. He stands today alongside such African-American luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and two of his novels, Native Son and Black Boy, are required reading in high schools and colleges across the nation. He died in 1960.