Black Boy | Richard Wright: Wearing the Mask
In the following excerpt, Adams offers his interpretation of Wright's Black Boy, arguing that its historical inaccuracies have deliberate, metaphorical purpose.
Like the autobiographies of Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright's Black Boy, published in 1945, has confused readers because of its generic ambiguity. For many readers, the book is particularly honest, sincere, open, convincing, and accurate. But for others, Black Boy leaves a feeling of inauthenticity, a sense that the story or its author is not to be trusted. These conflicting reactions are best illustrated by the following representative observations by Ralph K. White and W. E. B. Du Bois. White, a psychologist, has identified [in "Black Boy"]...
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