100 best nonfiction books: No 36 – Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth by Richard Wright

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This influential memoir of a rebellious southern boyhood vividly evokes the struggle for African American identity in the decades before civil rights

Robert McCrum
Monday 3 October 2016
00.45 EDT

Great coming-of-age memoirs have a potency rare in literature, and can be just as influential as great novels. Richard Wright, outstanding in both genres, was an important 20th-century African American writer, renowned for his 1940 novel, Native Son. Together with Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, Wright was crucial in forging an authentic literary consciousness for the black community as it struggled to escape decades of oppression after the civil war.

The bestselling Black Boy, published in 1945 (its original title had been Black Confession), explored the background to Native Son, but was also a visceral and unforgettable account of a young black man’s coming of age in the American south in the bitter decades before the civil rights movement.

Full of vivid scenes and arresting vignettes, it begins with four-year-old Richard (“angry, fretful and impatient”) setting fire to the family home, a brilliant opening that establishes young Wright as a fiery protagonist. Indeed, he presents himself throughout Black Boy as a rebel, at odds with both his ailing mother, his faithless, improvident father and tyrannical “Granny”. After the fire, the Wright family headed to Memphis, Tennessee where they lived in “a brick tenement”.

Young Richard goes to school; his father deserts the family and his sons are put into care. Eventually, they move to Arkansas, where Wright broods on “the cultural barrenness of black life”. For him, however, there is not even the consolation of religion. He’s an atheist. In church, when his fellows sing: “Amazing grace, how sweet it sounds”, he is humming under his breath: “A bulldog ran my grandma down.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/03/black-boy-richard-wright-100-best-nonfiction-books-civil-rights-us

[Jim__]

1. Does he have a full list of 100 books yet?

I can find a list from 36 to 1. I can't find the rest. I wasn't clear from reading the article if he's completed his list of 100 yet.

Having seen his list of 36, I had to go find a complete list of 100 - Modern Library's list - actually 2 lists, the board's list and the readers' list. Black Boy is 13th on the board's pick on this list.

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2. It looks like he's reviewing them, one a week.

ML has a good list.