Reading Order
Black Boy Reading Order
Black Boy (1945) by Richard Wright is one of the great American autobiographies — the account of Wright's childhood and youth in the Jim Crow South, from his earliest memories in Mississippi through his self-education as a reader, his encounters with white violence and Black accommodation, his discovery of H.L. Mencken and the realization that words could be a weapon, and his escape to Chicago. Originally titled American Hunger (the Chicago portion, dealing with Wright's disillusionment with the Communist Party, was suppressed by the Book-of-the-Month Club and published separately in 1977), Black Boy is both a classic memoir and one of the most powerful accounts of what it means to grow up Black in the American South under racial segregation. Wright's autobiography stands in a specific tradition of African-American self-examination that includes Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) and W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and it is the direct predecessor of James Baldwin's essays and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me. What distinguishes Wright's account is its controlled fury: Wright is not interested in explaining himself to white readers or demonstrating Black humanity; he is telling the truth about what it costs to be Black and intelligent in a world determined to keep you ignorant and obedient. The memoir's famous last sentence — 'I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, and my heart was suddenly and very strange, full of a sense of wonder and awe' — is the culmination of the narrative's account of how a Black man from Mississippi became one of the 20th century's most important American writers.
Where to start
Black Boy — any HarperCollins edition that includes the complete text (both the Southern section and the Chicago section, sometimes published together as Black Boy/American Hunger). The Library of America edition is the authoritative complete text.
Complete Black Boy Book List
- 1Buy
Black Boy
Richard Wright·1945·The memoir — Wright's childhood in Mississippi, his self-education, his encounters with white violence, and his escape to Chicago; the controlled fury of a man who refused to be what the South required of him. - 2Buy
Native Son
Richard Wright·1940·Wright's breakthrough novel — Bigger Thomas's destruction in Chicago; the fiction companion that shows what happens to the Black man who doesn't escape, written five years before the memoir that shows Wright's own escape. - 3Buy
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass·1845·Douglass's foundational slave narrative — the tradition that Black Boy belongs to; the earlier account of a Black man's self-education in a world determined to keep him illiterate, a century before Wright. - 4Buy
The Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. Du Bois·1903·Du Bois's foundational essays — the predecessor in African-American nonfiction's account of double consciousness; the tradition Wright inherits and transforms with his specific Mississippi account of what segregation does to a growing mind. - 5Buy
Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin·1955·Baldwin's first essay collection — the direct successor to Black Boy in the African-American autobiographical tradition; Baldwin writing from New York and Paris about race, his father, and what America has made of its Black citizens. - 6Buy
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates·2015·Coates's letter to his son — the 21st-century successor in the tradition; the same account of what America does to the Black body, updated for a generation after Wright's, still in the same country. - 7Buy
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou·1969·Angelou's memoir — the female companion in African-American autobiography; the South, the self-education, and the determination to become an artist, from a woman's perspective in the same period Wright depicts. - 8Buy
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X and Alex Haley·1965·Malcolm X's life story — the companion in African-American autobiography of a man who educates himself in prison; the same tradition of Black self-making against American racism, in a different but parallel mode.
Black Boy — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Black Boy about?
Black Boy follows Richard Wright from his earliest childhood memories in Natchez, Mississippi through his youth in Jackson, Mississippi, his move to Memphis, Tennessee, and finally his escape to Chicago in 1927. The narrative covers Wright's encounters with white violence (a near-lynching of his uncle, encounters with white employers who expect him to play the role of the humble, grateful Negro), his complex relationship with his own family (his grandmother's strict religious household, his absent father, his mother's illness), his discovery of literature (he reads Mencken's A Book of Prefaces and realizes that prose can be a weapon against the world), and his gradual decision that the South is not survivable. The Chicago section (written but initially suppressed) deals with Wright's involvement with the Communist Party and his eventual break with it, finding it as constraining as the South in different ways.
How does Black Boy relate to Wright's fiction?
Black Boy and Native Son (1940) are companion works that approach the same subject — the destruction of Black life in America — from opposite angles. Native Son tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a Black man who is destroyed by the Chicago environment that Wright himself escaped to; it shows what happens when the South's psychological damage is brought north and finds no release except in violence. Black Boy tells the story of Wright himself — the man who escaped, who found language, who became a writer. The two works form a kind of diptych: Native Son is the nightmare that didn't happen, Black Boy is the story of how Wright managed to escape it. Reading them together reveals how precisely Wright understood the forces he was writing about because he had experienced them.
Why was the Chicago section of Black Boy suppressed?
The Book-of-the-Month Club, which selected Black Boy as a major selection in 1945, required Wright to remove the Chicago section (originally titled 'The Horror and the Glory' in the manuscript) as a condition of the selection. The club's judgment was that the Chicago section — which deals with Wright's involvement with and disillusionment with the Communist Party — would be commercially and politically problematic during wartime. Wright complied, cutting the book to the Southern section only. The Chicago section was published separately in 1977 as American Hunger (after Wright's death in 1960) and the complete text, restoring both sections under Wright's original title (the Library of America edition, 1991), is now available and is generally considered the authoritative version.
How does Black Boy compare to other African-American autobiographies?
Black Boy is part of a major tradition of African-American autobiography: Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) is the foundational text (self-education in slavery, escape to freedom through literacy); Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901) is the accommodationist version (education as the path to racial progress through working within the system); Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is the intellectual predecessor; and Wright's Black Boy is the furious, unaccommodating version — the account of what it costs to be Black and intelligent in a world that requires you to be neither. Baldwin's essays (beginning with Notes of a Native Son in 1955) and Coates's Between the World and Me (2015) are the successors in the same tradition.
What should I read after Black Boy?
After Black Boy, Wright's Native Son (1940) is the fiction companion — the nightmare that the memoir's escape avoided. The complete text of Black Boy (including the Chicago section, published as American Hunger) is also essential. For the African-American autobiography tradition, Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) is the foundational predecessor, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son (1955) the most important successor, and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (2015) the 21st-century continuation. For Wright scholarship, Hazel Rowley's Richard Wright: The Life and Times (2001) is the standard biography.
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