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Richard Wright's book Black Boy

Richard Wright's book Black Boy is a non-fiction work which recounts the early life of the author, pointing out many of his formative influences as a young black man in the South at a time when racism was rampant. America at the time was a land in which whites enjoyed all the advantages while the blacks were relegated to poverty and were discriminated against at every turn. Wright found that he had to behave in a certain way to survive, and yet in the long run he did not learn his lessons as well as did some others. A deep anger infuses his writing, and often it is directed as much at black society for allowing if not accepting this disparity as it is toward white society for creating it in the first place. Black Boy is both a personal account and a document detailing the social structure of a people in a certain time and place. In many ways, this autobiography has a subversive intent, undermining traditional notions of autobiography, setting the author forth as a rebellious spirit more by accident than design, and challenging the traditions of American autobiography in particular, which were usually books telling the reader how the author had pulled himself up by his bootstraps to succeed and so how the reader could do the same. Wright has also succeeded, but his anger is not something the reader would or is expected to emulate unless the reader is also black and has had the same experience. This autobiography is itself infused with this anger to such a degree that it shapes the way he tells his story and comes through to the reader as a palpable quality. The work is nontraditional in that it is novelistic in style, and though it is in the first person, it never announces itself as an autobiography but only allows the nature of the story to emerge through the anger and sensibility of the central consciousness, the narrator who is also the subject and the author.

Richard Wright was born in 1908 on a plantation outside Natc...

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Richard Wright's book Black Boy. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:03, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682600.html