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Coming of Age in Mississippi | A Comparison of Coming of Age in Mississippi with Black Boy

In this essay, Joyce Hart compares the personal, social, and historical circumstances surrounding Moody's book with Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy.

In Moody's autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi, readers learn that Moody was born in Centreville, Mississippi. This small Southern town, as it turns out, is only about fifty miles south of Richard Wright's birthplace, Roxie, Mississippi. The proximity of these towns and these writers' shared African-American ancestry make their life stories strangely similar. However, their autobiographies are significantly marked by the different time-frames in which the authors grew up, Wright in the 1920s and 1930s and Moody in the 1950s and 1960s.

Juxtaposing Wright's

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