Richard Wright made a masterful recording of his own life in the
form of the novel Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth.
The work earned him a place as "father" of the post-WWII black
novel and precursor of the Black Arts movements of the 1960s.
Published in 1945 as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Black
Boy was received enthusiastically by the reading public and
topped the best-seller lists, with 400,000 copies sold. The
commercial success of this novel secured for Wright what his
acclaimed novel of 1940, Native Son, had demanded. With these
two works, Richard Wright is correctly said to be one of the most
powerful forces in twentieth-century American literature. Without
doubt, he is the most powerful influence on modern African
American writing due to his impact on James Baldwin (Another
Country, 1962), and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1953).
Black Boy is an autobiographical work in which Wright adapted
formative episodes from his own life into a "coming of age" plot.
In the novel, Richard is a boy in the Jim Crow American South.
This was a system of racial segregation practiced in some states
of the U.S., which treated blacks as second-class citizens. In his
novel, Wright emphasizes two environmental forces of this
system: hunger and language He shows how hunger drives the
already oppressed to even more desperate acts, and his emphasis
on language explains how he managed to survive Jim Crow: by
developing an attention to language as a coping mechanism for
the surface world of life. Meanwhile, literature offered him internal
release from the tensions of living without the freedom to express
his dignity as a human being. Thus, Wright's novel is a powerful
story of the individual struggle for the freedom of expression.
Richard is the protagonist of the story— the "black boy." He sees
himself as a victim of his surroundings, an existentialist view of
limited choice in every circumstance. The only thing he is ever
sure of, that which drives him to leave the South and tell his
story, is the idea that his conception of the world is unique, and
that this makes him different.
Themes:
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Prejudice and Tolerance
Race and Racism
Meaning of Life
Individualism