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Black Boy

(American Hunger)

by Richard Wright

ISBN: 0060929782
ISBN-13: 9780060929787
Format: Paperback

Summary

Published in 1945, this autobiography-the story of Wright's Southern childhood, up to the time when he left Memphis for Chicago-is considered by many critics to be his most important work.

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Media Reviews

"One rises from the reading of such a book with mixed thoughts. Richard Wright uses vigorous and straightforward English; often there is real beauty in his words even when they are mingled with sadism....Yet at the result one is baffled. Evidently if this is an actual record, bad as the world is, such concentrated meanness, filth and despair never completely filled it or any particular part of it. But if the book is meant to be a creative picture and a warning, even then, it misses its possible effectiveness becuase it is as a work of art so patently and terribly overdrawn."    -- W. E. B. Du Bois

   -- Weekly Book Review

"In this poignant and disturbing book of one of the most gifted of America's younger writers turns from fiction to tell the story of his own life during the nineteen years he lived in the South. The book is poignant because Richard Wright as a child and adolescent was a highly sensitive individual subjected to a series of cruel and almost unbearable shocks. It is disturbing because one wonders how many similarly sensitive individuals have been crushed by the circumstances which did not crush Richard Wright."    -- R. L. Duffus

   -- New York Times Book Review

"'Black Boy' is filled with blues-tempered echoes of railroad trains, the names of Southern towns and cities, estrangements, fights and flights, deaths and disappointments, charged with physical and spiritual hungers and pain. And like a blues sung by such an artist as Bessie Smith, its lyrical prose evokes the paradoxical, almost surreal image of a black boy singing lustily as he probes his own grievous wound....And while it is true that 'Black Boy' presents an almost unrelieved picture of a personality corrupted by brutal environment, it also presents those fresh, human responses brought to its world by the sensitive child."    -- Ralph Ellison

"[A]bove all, in 'Black Boy', I found expressed, for the first time in my life, the sorrow, the rage, and the murderous bitterness which was eating up my life....His work was an immense liberation and revelation for me."    -- James Baldwin

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Harpercollins
Published date: 1998
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 8.25 x 8.5 inches
Weight: 0.85 pounds
Pages: 419

Publisher's Notes

Wright's unforgettable and eloquent autobiography of growing up in the Jim Crow South offers an unsurpassed portrait of the struggles against the ingrained racism and poverty faced by African Americans.

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Black Boy (The Restored Text Established by The Library of America) (Perennial Classics)

Richard A. Wright

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