Writing Black Boy and American Hunger provided Wright not only with a forum to denounce the racial atrocities he had witnessed but also with an opportunity to purge what he considered the cultural and psychological pretenses that alienated him during his childhood and most of his young adult life. In Black Boy, Wright recalls how he used tomull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair.

Wright uses both autobiographies to elaborate on these unflattering remarks, to probe his inner thoughts in relation to what he loosely viewed as the collective African American psyche. In Black Boy, he concentrates mainly on his immediate family to show how only after he took a violent stand against their conventional ways did he gain his independence and win respect. He targets African American Communists in American Hunger, arguing that they lacked the strength to develop their own political platform and that they remained blind and uninformed because party leaders had convinced them that the most pressing social and political problems had been solved. As Michel Fabre, one of Wright’s biographers, points out, both autobiographies function therapeutically, as “an inner adventure, akin to psychoanalysis,” by which Wright “could come to reevaluate his personality and his career at the very moment when his break with communism was causing him to question himself and seek in himself a new direction.”

Of course, Wright also knew that the bleak state of black America resulted from hundreds of years of oppression. Like other committed intellectuals, he recognized that African Americans had been denied entrance into the dominant American culture, that they “had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it.” Because Wright had overcome his barefoot beginnings and discovered his gift of writing, he felt compelled to speak for an entire people who he believed shared a common experience. “I wanted to give, lend my tongue to the voiceless Negro boys,” Wright commented on the writing of Black Boy, adding,I wrote the book to tell a series of incidents strung through my childhood, but the main desire was to render a judgment on my environment. . . . That judgment was this: the environment the South creates is too small to nourish human beings, especially Negro human beings.

In one telling passage, Wright even forgives his father when the two are reunited years after his father’s desertion; Wright realizes that his father had not been given “a chance to learn the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition” because the elder Wright, like so many other African Americans, had been a helpless victim of southern oppression.

In American Hunger, Wright levels the same charges against the North, where racial hatred stifled social mobility and subjected African Americans to an inferior position. Wright quickly realized that the more tolerant North also had its drawbacks, that if he chose “not to submit,” he would inevitably embrace the more subtle horror of stress, anxiety, and permanent restlessness. Having lived in the North for more than fifteen years, Wright could sympathize with disgruntled African Americans who returned to their impoverished southern roots. The “white tormentors” might continue their oppressive behavior, Wright argued, but at least in the South African Americans knew who they faced and what they had to overcome in order to achieve social equality.