Remembering Richard Wright, Outsider

Clifford Thompson at The Common Reader:

Richard Wright (1908–60) left behind seventeen book-length works of fiction and nonfiction, two of which, the novel Native Son (1940) and the memoir Black Boy (1945), stand as essential works of American literature, and all of which have a great deal to tell us about American society and the world as they function today.

Black Boy is the story of Wright’s growing up poor and constantly hungry in the South—Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas—in a family whose religious strictures paralleled the absurd, inescapable racial strictures of that time and region, leaving the young man doubly isolated from mainstream society. Isolated and yet, even as he was often dazed from lack of food, oddly free: his outsider status allowed him to see the world around him more objectively than most, and combined with his intelligence, rebelliousness, and inner strength, it made him fiercely independent. Sent by his grandmother to spend time alone in prayer, he wrote his very first short story instead; advised by his peers to be obsequious in every encounter with Whites so as to avoid arousing their anger, he was unable, he wrote, to “make subservience an automatic part of my behavior”; selected as his class valedictorian in ninth grade—his last year of formal schooling—he insisted on giving the speech he had written rather than the one that had been written for him. Finally, determined to escape his suffocating environment, as a young adult Wright made his way eventually to Chicago, where—despite initially failing to make the weight requirement due to malnutrition—he found work in the post office and spent his free time writing.

More here.

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