Black Boy is Richard Wright’s self-authored memoir. “Memoir” is a better description for Black Boy than “biography” because rather than tell the story of a life, Black Boy tells stories from a life. Over the course of the work, Wright shares many of the anecdotes and transformative incidents from his life that molded him into an influential author.
Split into two parts, Black Boy traces Wright’s life as a boy growing up in segregated Mississippi as the son of an illiterate sharecropper. Most of the book’s central ideas, including the themes of physical and intellectual hunger, resentment of authority, and racial oppression, first appear in part I. Part II, which picks up when Wright...
