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Richard Wright: Later Works

Black Boy (American Hunger) | The Outsider

Edited by Arnold Rampersad

“Edited by Arnold Rampersad, a professor of English at Princeton, this superb edition of Wright’s major works and some minor ones restores the second part of Black Boy and cuts in Native Son demanded by the book club in 1939. It also includes a chronology so complete that it reads like a biography in miniature as well as unusually explicit notes on the differences between Wright and the publishing world 50 years ago.”— Alfred Kazin, The New York Times

Overview

Overview

News LOA to publish a never-before-seen novel by the legendary author of Native Son
May 20, 2021

News Adopt this book: Richard Wright: Later Works
February 19, 2021

Save $15 when you buy both volumes of the Richard Wright edition in a deluxe boxed set.

Native Son and Black Boy are classics of twentieth-century American literature—and yet the novel and memoir known to millions of readers are in fact revised and abbreviated versions of the books Richard Wright wrote. The two-volume Library of America edition presents for the first time Wright’s major works in the form in which he intended them to be read. The authoritative new texts, based on Wright’s original typescripts and proofs, reveal the full range and power of this achievement as an experimental stylist and as a fiery prophet of the tragic consequences of racism in American society.

Wright’s wrenching memoir Black Boy, an eloquent account of his struggle to escape a life of poverty, ignorance and fear in his native South, was an immediate bestseller when it appeared in 1945. But Wright’s complete autobiography, published for the first time in this volume as Black Boy (American Hunger), is a far more complex and probing work. Its original second section, in which Wright chronicled his encounter with racism in the North, his apprenticeship as a writer, and his disillusionment with the Communist Party, was cut at the insistence of book club editors and was only published posthumously as a separate work. Now that the two parts of Wright’s autobiography are finally printed together, Black Boy (American Hunger) appears as a new and different work—a unique contribution to the literature of self-discovery and a searing vision of racism in Northern slums as well as Southern shanties.

Richard Wright’s novel The Outsider (1953) appears here in a text that restores the many stylistic changes and long cuts made by his editors without his knowledge. This text, based on Wright’s final, corrected typescript, casts new light on his development of the style he called “poetic realism.” The “outsider” of Wright’s story is Cross Damon, a black man who works in the Chicago post office. When Damon is mistakenly believed to have died in a subway accident, he seizes the opportunity to invent a new life for himself. In this, his most philosophical novel, Wright reconsiders the existentialist themes of man’s freedom and responsibility as he traces Damon’s doomed attempts to lead a free life.

Richard Wright was “forged in injustice as a sword is forged,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. With passionate honesty and courage, he confronted the terrible effects of prejudice and intolerance and created works that explore the deepest conflicts of the human heart.

This volume includes notes on significant changes in Wright’s texts and a detailed chronology of his life.

Arnold Rampersad, volume editor, is Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and a member of the Department of English at Stanford University. He has written biographies of Langston Hughes (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), Jackie Robinson, and, most recently, Ralph Ellison.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-0-94045067-7 887 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 56 Library of America Series

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