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African American Literature: Black Boy
Richard Wright's 1945 autobiography Black Boy covers his life from four years of age to the moment of his departure from the South (Memphis, Tennessee, where he had earlier migrated from Mississippi) to the North (Chicago) at nineteen. Its subject and title place it in the tradition of African American autobiography, beginning with the nineteenth-century slave narrative, a genre in which the autobiographer describes the particularities of his own life in order to speak of the situation and condition of the race in general. While presenting the details of one life, Black Boy is intended to reveal the horrors, cruelties, and privations undergone by the masses of African Americans living in the South (and in the United States as a whole) during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Originally Wright's Black Boy was the first section of a much longer work titled American Hunger and divided into two parts: “Southern Night”, detailing Wright's early life in the South, and “The Horror and the Glory”, treating his life in Chicago and describing racism northern style. After Harper & Brothers received the manuscript from Wright, they submitted it to the Book-of-the-Month Club for consideration as a monthly selection. The club agreed to accept it on condition that its first section alone, later titled by Wright Black Boy, be published. The complete text of the second section of American Hunger was first published in 1977 by Harper & Row. The entire work, composed of both sections, as Wright originally wrote it, was published for the first time in 1992 by the Library of America.

One of the primary themes of Wright's autobiographical narrative involves the influence of racism on the personal interrelations not only among the individuals of the oppressed group but within the family itself. The first episode of the narrative, in which Wright at four years of age innocently burns down the family home, has no racial implications per se, but the response of his mother does. As punishment Wright is so severely beaten with a tree limb that he lapses into semi-consciousness and requires the attention of a physician. The mother's response is in direct correlation to the family's economic circumstance. They are poor because they are black, and the harshness of his punishment reflects the degree of the family's economic loss. On another occasion, when Wright is badly cut behind the ear by a broken bottle in a fight between black and white boys, his mother, instead of extending the comfort and sympathy ordinarily expected of a parent toward a wounded child, beats him to warn him of the dangers of fighting whites.

Black Boy's historical significance lies in its recapitulation of the thrust of black autobiography in its use of the form as a means of righting social wrong. Other African American writers have used literature to perform this function, but none before Wright had been as outspoken. In episode after episode Wright describes through his own experience of racial repression that was undergone by millions of his brothers and sisters. At the same time, he relates the story of his own growth.

Bibliography

Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 1973
Donald B. Gibson

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Notes on Novels: Black Boy
Contents:

Author Biography
Plot Summary
Characters
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
For Further Study




Richard Wright made a masterful recording of his own life in the form of the novel Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. The work earned him a place as "father" of the post-WWII black novel and precursor of the Black Arts movements of the 1960s. Published in 1945 as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Black Boy was received enthusiastically by the reading public and topped the best-seller lists, with 400,000 copies sold. The commercial success of this novel secured for Wright what his acclaimed novel of 1940, Native Son, had demanded. With these two works, Richard Wright is correctly said to be one of the most powerful forces in twentieth-century American literature. Without doubt, he is the most powerful influence on modern African American writing due to his impact on James Baldwin (Another Country, 1962), and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1953).

Black Boy is an autobiographical work in which Wright adapted formative episodes from his own life into a "coming of age" plot. In the novel, Richard is a boy in the Jim Crow American South. This was a system of racial segregation practiced in some states of the U.S., which treated blacks as second-class citizens. In his novel, Wright emphasizes two environmental forces of this system: hunger and language. He shows how hunger drives the already oppressed to even more desperate acts, and his emphasis on language explains how he managed to survive Jim Crow: by developing an attention to language as a coping mechanism for the surface world of life. Meanwhile, literature offered him internal release from the tensions of living without the freedom to express his dignity as a human being. Thus, Wright's novel is a powerful story of the individual struggle for the freedom of expression.