Black Boy

Black Boy is the autobiography of the American writer Richard Wright published in 1945 in the publishing house HarperCollins. The 1947 published in Steinberg Publisher Zurich German translation with the title "I negro boy: the story of a childhood and youth had" obtained Rudolf Frank under the pseudonym Harry Rosbaud.

The book was the inspiration for an American TV documentary " Richard Wright - Black Boy " from 1995 about the author.

The Harper Collins Publisher sold 195,000 copies of the work in the original edition. The paid circulation of the Book of the Month Club, a book club, is indicated with 351,000.

In the U.S., the book is considered common school curriculum.

Content

Wright grew up in Jackson, and Arkansas. The years are shaped by racism of the American South and the family. He meets violence as a completely accepted means of communication in this environment. The father left the family for another woman and the womb after the murder of his uncle under the load together.

The author describes himself in this novel as an outcast. After the mother him and his brother could not take care of, he comes to his grandmother. This is a devout seven-day Adventist and Richard gets her into conflict, as the lack of a religious relationship between his grandmother noticed negative. Also, it came into conflict with his aunt and uncle because his agnosticism and his only escape from violence, hunger and human isolation, namely the reading of cheap romance book at these met with incomprehension. Fictional applies with his relatives as the devil's work. During this time, the only ally is his sick mother.

He fights with labor and criminal activities the ubiquitous hunger. Wright begins with the letter and succeeds accommodate a story in the local black newspaper.

After the end of school, he begins with his escape to the North. First, Wright makes in Memphis intermediate station. There, Richard meets the world of literature to know and then continues his escape. After arriving in Chicago, he brings something of the spirit of the South as a rural particular person.

American hunger

The ( at the request of the Book of the Month Club in the original edition omitted ) second part of the book deals with Wright's experiences with the Communist Party of the United States and was published under the title American Hunger in 1977 posthumously.