Sort ungdom (1945)

An Extraordinary Life
Review of the Harper Perennial Modern Classics paperback edition (Feb. 2020), an expanded edition of the original hardcover "Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth" (1945)

This excellent 75th Anniversary edition of author Richard Wright's autobiography restores the complete planned text before its separate publications as Black Boy in 1945 and the dropped 2nd section published posthumously as American Hunger in 1977. This new edition includes an Introduction by John Edgar Wideman, Afterwords by Wright's daughter and grandson, a timeline chronology, and notes on the text (these latter also detail the edits made for the original publication in 1945).

I read Black Boy as part of a blind subscription to independent bookshop Shakespeare and Company's 2020 Year of Reading Lost Treasures. ( )

Initially, I had ignorantly expected fiction, so this was a departure from my usual reading. I found it a little slow, but powerful at times. The long section about communism that wrapped the book up interested me less than the rest. Reading some of the episodes described in the book that took place nearly a century ago and connecting them to very similar racially motivated brutality in the present day was sobering. ( )

pangs performance ( )

From Amazon.com: Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment--a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering.

A memoir that reads like fiction, this is a fascinating look at Jim Crow South and Depression-era Communism. ( )