This book was very interesting to me because it was the first time I had read a novel set in the US in the 20th century. Black Boy, by Richard Wright, is a memoir of Wright's childhood memories. He grew up fast in Mississippi, where he experienced hate, hunger, fear, and violence. Wright noticed that the white men in his life were being treated differently than the Black men, the Black men were treated like slaves for the white men. Wright always had dreams of escaping his life in the Jim Crow south and moving to Chicago for something better, and as an adult he was finally able to do that and start his new life where he wrote his this world-famous novel: Black Boy.

-Anonymous eleventh-grade teen volunteer

 

Publisher's description:

When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that "if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy." Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for "obscenity" and "instigating hatred between the races."

 

Wright's once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and Blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he headed north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo." Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate. "To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness," John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. "Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear."