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Start giftingBlack Boy
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Learn moreBrought to you by Penguin.
Richard Wright's memoir of his childhood as a young black boy in the American south of the 1920s and 30s is a stark depiction of African-American life and a powerful exploration of racial tension.
At four years old, Richard Wright set fire to his home in a moment of boredom; at five his father deserted the family; by six Richard was - temporarily - an alcoholic. It was in saloons, railroad yards and streets that he learned the facts about life, about fear, hunger and hatred, while his mother's long illness taught him about suffering. In a world of white hostility and subjugation it would be his love of books and pursuit of knowledge that would propel him to follow his dream of justice and opportunity in the north.
A chronicle of coming of age under the racial prejudices of the American south, as much the story of a writer finding his voice, Black Boy remains one of the great, impassioned memoirs of the twentieth century.
'A compelling indictment of life in the Deep South between the wars' Daily Telegraph
© Richard Wright 1945 (P) Penguin Audio 2020
Richard Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908, to a sharecropping family of ex-slaves. His mother was a schoolteacher but, abandoned by her husband, she had to resort to menial jobs to feed her two sons before suffering a series of strokes. During a childhood scarred by hunger, Wright lived in Memphis, Tennessee, then in an orphanage, and with various relatives. He left home at fifteen, returned to Memphis for two years to work, and in 1934 went to Chicago where he was employed at the Post Office before beginning work at the Federal Writers' Project in 1935. He published Uncle Tom's Children in 1938 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year. His other books include Native Son (1940), his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), and The Outsider (1953). After the war, Richard Wright chose expatriation and went to live in Paris with his family, remaining there until his death in 1960.