Richard Wright’s Black Boy

Richard Wright’s book Black Boy is a non-fiction work which recounts the early life of the author, pointing out many of his formative influences as a young black man in the South at a time when racism was rampant. America at the time was a land of excess, with whites enjoying all the advantages while the blacks were relegated to poverty and were even then discriminated against as if they were taking something from white society. Wright absorbs this in an interesting way, beginning as a young man who did not see the difference between black and white and who had to be trained, as it were, to see the difference and to live it every day. He found that he had to behave in a certain way to survive, and yet in the long run he did not learn his lessons as well as did some others.