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Paperback Black Boy: American Hunger a Record of Childhood and Youth Book

ISBN: 0060929782

ISBN13: 9780060929787

Black Boy

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Book Overview

"Superb. . . . A great American writer speaks with his own voice about matters that still resonate at the center of our lives." --New York Times Book ReviewA striking new edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author's grandson.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 may his way 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 year later, his words continue to reverberate. "To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness," John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. "Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear."One of the great American memoirs, Wright's account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance--a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. This description may be from another edition of this product.
More by Richard Wright
A trailblazing African-American novelist, playwright, and memoirist, Richard A. Wright brought the experiences of the twentieth-century ghetto into the realm of high art with his blockbuster 1940 novel Native Son. He went on to mix autobiography and fiction, and to become one of the most celebrated ... Learn More About This Author

Customer Reviews

30 customer ratings | 6 reviews

Rated 5 stars
Very Compelling

“Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything?" I loved how defiant and questioning the narrator was. Also, there were no lulls in the story, it was concise. Cornel...

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Rated 5 stars
Outstanding, powerful, deeply moving

coming to wright as an adult, i was stunned by the powerful combination of his words and james' voice to listen to this book is to be given a rare opportunity to truly appreciate the pain of another person, and to appereciate their life experiences some may be dismissive today of the relative lack of black achievement in american society when they say 'hey, slavery ended in 1865. get your act together already!' but by...

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Rated 5 stars
Enthralling

Several years ago, I was assigned the first half of this book in an American History class. I sat down expecting it to be only mildly interesting, but by the end of the first chapter I was hooked. I read the whole thing straight through, from cover to cover, in about sixteen hours, furiously scribbling notes on every page. The narrative itself is vivid and compelling, and the style, structure, and ideas in Wright's autobiography...

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Rated 5 stars
Black Boy

When I first picked up this book all I thought was just another reading assignment. However, Black Boy by Richard Wright affected me in ways no book ever has. This book is a touching autobiography describing the life of a young African American boy who struggles to find himself in such a prejudice society. He overcomes obstacles of religious, racial, and cultural segregation in the 20th century United States. During Richard's...

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Rated 5 stars
A Classic That Must be Read

In my quest to either reread or read the first time some of the timeless classics by African American writers this year, I tried to avoid reading this one. I just wasn't up to reading about another downtrodden, poverty-stricken, living in the ghetto story. But it is more than that. This masterpiece is a commentary on a way of life in the early part of the 1900s, a life that many African Americans endured and survived coming...

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