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 of excess, with whites enjoying all the advantages while the blacks were relegated to poverty and were even then discriminated against as if they were taking something from white society. Wright absorbs this in an interesting way, beginning as a young man who did not see the difference between black and white and who had to be trained, as it were, to see the difference and to live it every day. He 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. This experience is structured on excess rather than on the normalcy, the average, that marked much of white society.

Richard Wright was born in 1908 and died suddenly from a heart attack in 1960. His birthplace was a plantation outside Natchez, Mississippi. His father, Nathan Wright, was a sharecropper, and his mother, Ella, was a country schoolteacher. The boy grew up in one of the mo

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points to the excess he finds in white society and to the way this excess harms black people, but he also finds excess in the black community, an excess that emerges in the book in a way that caused some to see the book as filled with self-hatred. Wright himself had acknowledged a certain degree of self hatred, though he also denied that it had influenced his book: He would rather believe that blacks remained imprisoned in emotional ghettoes and were not free enough to face their experience in all of its nakedness. . . From the perspective of his own ordeal and his Marxist training, he saw black people as people in constant torment and agony, and few black critics were willing to accept this view of black life. Much of Wright's life as recounted in Black Boy can be seen as a series of excesses, from the religion his grandmother imposed on him to the image he was forced to adopt as a black in a white society. He notes how he recoiled from the implications of the religion his grandmother fostered, a religion of the old school, with fire-and-brimstone and a sense of sin: Many of the religious symbols appealed to my sensibilities and I responded to the dramatic vision of life held by the church, feeling that to live day by day w

Category: Literature - R