Narrative
Black Boy
Richard Wright · 1945
Synopsis
A four-year-old boy sets fire to the curtains in his grandmother's house, which partly burns down. His father leaves with another woman, his mother falls ill; he goes through an orphanage, then lives in Jackson with his grandmother, a Seventh-day Adventist, who bans all secular books from her home and forbids him to work on Saturdays. He is hungry for years. He sells a newspaper that a customer tells him serves the Ku Klux Klan, then works for an optician in Memphis and borrows books from the library reserved for whites with a colleague's card, passing himself off as his errand boy.
Context
A manuscript titled American Hunger was submitted in December 1943 to Harper, which accepted it. In June 1944, the Book-of-the-Month Club agreed to distribute it only if reduced to its first fourteen chapters, and Wright renamed the shortened book. The excised part appeared on its own in 1977, and the full text in 1991 in the Library of America. In the Senate, Theodore Bilbo denounced it as the most obscene writing imaginable; it would be challenged in schools for decades, as far as the Supreme Court in 1982.
Who it is for
An autobiographical narrative in the first person, read in its short version until 1991. Translated into French by Marcel Duhamel, with Andrée R. Picard, as early as 1947.
Prizes and reception
Top of the American bestseller lists in spring 1945, with about four hundred thousand copies.
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