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 most poverty-stricken and rigidly segregated parts of the South, an experience that certainly marked his work as a writer. The family moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1914 in search of better employment. Nathan then worked as a night porter in a hotel, while Ella worked as a cook for a white family. The family was left destitute when Nathan left Ella for another woman, and in 1915 Ella contracted an illness that eventually made her an invalid for the rest of he l...