Richard Wright's book Black Boy
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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 i
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th than take that beating. In the end, though, he comes out and takes his medicine:
I was lashed so hard and long that I lost consciousness. I was beaten out of my sense and later I found myself in bed, screaming, determined to run away, tussling with my mother and father who were trying to keep me still (Wright 8).
Much of Wright's life as recounted in Black Boy can be seen as a series of social pressures, from the religion his grandmother imposed on him to the image he was forced to adopt as a black in a white society. Certain forms of expression were seen in one way in the black world and in another in the white. Black critics did not like the way Wright talked about their world, while white critics responded to his book as a truthful and honest account of his life and experience, angering black critics all the more. They would indeed have preferred a more traditional autobiography, one that taught what they saw as a positive lesson to the youth of the black community rather than one that found cause for such rage in both black and white communities.
One white critic who valued this anger was Lionel Trilling. Trilling finds that the anger is presented as a reasonable response to the efforts of white society to destro
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Approximate Word count = 2225
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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