SOURCE: Thaddeus, Janice. “The Metamorphosis of Richard Wright's Black Boy.” American Literature 57, no. 2 (May 1985): 199-214.

There are two kinds of autobiography—defined and open. In a defined autobiography, the writer presents his life as a finished product. He is likely to have reached a plateau, a moment of resolution which allows him to recollect emotion in tranquility. This feeling enables him to create a firm setting for his reliable self, to see this self in relief against society or history. Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, for instance, is a defined autobiography, a public document, moving undeviatingly from self-denial to self-discovery. It rests on the fulcrum of: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”¹ The writer of an open autobiography differs from Douglass and others like him in that he is searching, not telling, so that like Boswell or Rousseau he offers questions instead of answers. He does not wish to supply a fulcrum, does not proffer conclusions and solutions, and consequently he refrains from shaping his life neatly in a teleological plot. The tone and purpose of an open autobiography are entirely different from a defined autobiography. Therefore, if an author needs to write an open autobiography, it must not be changed into the defined variety. But Richard Wright's Black Boy experienced such a metamorphosis.

The publishing history of Black Boy is most fully told in Michel Fabre's “Afterword” to Wright's other autobiographical work, American Hunger, which was released in 1977. However, even in Fabre's account, some of the important details are hazy. It is the purpose of this essay to clarify the entire incident and to document the metamorphosis of Black Boy.

Wright's Black Boy, published in 1945, is—so far as plot goes—molded and shapely, beginning in speechlessness and anger, and ending in articulateness and hope. The boy who at the age of four set fire to his own house, became a drunkard at the age of six, and was so frightened of a new school that he could not write his name on the board, by the final pages has fought and lied his way out of the racist South. The book fits into the familiar plot of the slave narrative. And it ends twenty years before its publication, a long swath of time during which the author has become a famous novelist, writer of Native Son. To a degree which has puzzled many readers, however, Black Boy also introduces oppositions—both imagistic and thematic—which it never resolves.

Black Boy's epigraph sets its theme, but that theme is paradoxical. Wright initiates his book with an unsettling quotation from Job: “They meet with darkness in the daytime / And they grope at noonday as in the night. …” Darkness and daytime, black and white, are insistent images throughout. Given the subject matter, this is an obvious choice, but Wright presents his oppositions with puzzling complexity. He mentions in passing in the opening paragraph that his grandmother is white, but it is not until fifty pages later that we discover that Granny was a slave, that she bears the name as well as the color of her white owner, that she does not know—or does not care to know—who her father was. If Granny is white, why is she black? The question is simple, but the answer is not, and Wright emphasizes this indefiniteness. In many scenes, as Gayle Gaskill has shown, Wright deliberately reverses the usual connotations Western tradition has assigned to black and white—that black is always bad and white is good.² For instance, when Wright's mother beats him nearly to death for setting their house on fire, he has a feverish dream. “Huge wobbly white bags, like the full udders of cows,” hang menacingly over him, and their whiteness is terrifying. Further, although they look like udders and therefore must represent mothers' milk, they threaten to engulf the four-year-old Wright in “some horrible liquid.”³ His mother has become his potential destroyer, and although she is black, her milk is white, and whiteness is evil. In the earlier version of this dream published in Uncle Tom's Children, the nightmare is attached to an incident where in a fight with a white gang a flung bottle cuts Wright behind the ear. Here, the apparitions are menacing white faces, a simpler and less psychologically determined image. In Black Boy, Wright's mother, like his grandmother, is a mixture of black and white. Although it is true that in Black Boy white images are often repressive and black images are often positive, Wright does not entirely deny the traditional meanings of the words. Wright's poodle Betsy is white, and he loves her whiteness, but he will not sell her to white people. If he has to use a blackboard, he emphasizes that the chalk is white. The chalk represents education—and terror. Throughout Black Boy Wright's imagery of black and white resists simple formulations. He has not shaped and tailored it to a simple, clear purpose.

The imagery of light and dark is similarly mutable. The South is dark, so dark that Wright frequently wonders over the fact that the sun is still shining. When he hears that an acquaintance has been lynched for presumably consorting with a white prostitute, it seems uncanny that life can continue: “I stood looking down the quiet, sun-filled street. Bob had been caught by the white death” (p. 190). Here, although the light is beautiful, whiteness means death. As readers, we recognize the reference to the black death, and are forced to the analogy that the animals carrying this plague are human. When Pease and Reynolds force Wright out of the optical shop where he had hoped to learn a trade, to help people literally to improve their vision, he recounts: “I went into the sunshine and walked home like a blind man” (p. 212). The sun shines, but not for him. In ironic and various ways, then, aesthetically and thematically, the book fulfills its epigraph. The result, however, is anxiety, not resolution.

Black Boy is a violent book, but it has not been sufficiently noted that violence is always linked with its opposite, in a poised opposition resembling the metaphorical tension just discussed. Wright's experiences have made him “strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful” (p. 112). Besides the imagery mentioned above, Wright's chief word for this indefinable yearning is hunger. The word and the fact of hunger recur like drumbeats throughout the book, an insistent refrain. Wright never has enough to eat: he steals food even when there is plenty; he receives an orange for Christmas and eats it with preternatural care; he fills his aching stomach with water; he is too thin to pass the postal examination. The hunger is both “bodily and spiritual” (p. 147), and the spiritual hunger is as insistent as its bodily counterpart. The entire book is strung between hunger and satisfaction, as well as light and dark and black and white, and similarly opposing, irreconcilable forces. The word tension appears so many times that Wright had to cut out thirty instances of it in the final draft.⁴

Among these oppositions the narrator becomes an immensely powerful but undefined force. Wright himself said, “One of the things that made me write is that I realize that I'm a very average Negro … maybe that's what makes me extraordinary.”⁵ This recognition of the self as typical is frequent in black autobiography, where beleaguering social forces chain the writer to his race. On the other hand, Wright also said, “I'm merely using a familiar literary form to unload many of the memories that have piled up in me, and now are coming out.”⁶ These views are quite incompatible, since an average person would not have to unload memories, and their rendering as competing forces in Black Boy is one of its greatest sources of interest—and tension.

But in spite of Black Boy's insistent refusal to resolve the oppositions upon which it rests, the final six pages nonetheless attempt to summarize the preceding experiences, to explain them, give them a defined significance. Wright asks, “From where in this southern darkness had I caught a sense of freedom” (p. 282)? And he proceeds to answer his question. He argues that books alone had kept him “alive in a negatively vital way” (p. 282), and especially books by “Dreiser, Masters, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis” which:

seemed defensively critical of the straitened American environment. These writers seemed to feel that America could be shaped nearer to the hearts of those who lived in it. And it was out of these novels and stories and articles, out of the emotional impact of imaginative constructions of heroic or tragic deeds, that I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth from an unseen light; and in my leaving I was groping toward that invisible light, always trying to keep my face so set and turned that I would not lose the hope of its faint promise, using it as my justification for action.

(p. 283)

These final words counteract the paradoxes of the epigraph. The black boy who was heading North was still blind at noonday, but he felt “warmth from an unseen light,” and that warmth was hope. He was groping, but groping toward something. The ultimate paragraph states that Wright's search was for the essential significance of life. “With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars” (p. 285). Even though this last paragraph is presented conditionally, it is strong and eloquent. The promise, even the faint promise, of “redeeming meaning” seems adequate to the dignity of “having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.” We feel that hunger has at last changed to hope.

But this final statement, wrapping up and rounding out the book, is not what Wright had originally planned to publish when he finished Black Boy in December of 1943. As is now well known, the book was half again as long and its title was American Hunger. It reached page proofs and its jacket was designed. The full autobiography ends in 1937, ten years later than Black Boy, only six years before the actual writing of the book. Therefore, Wright had not achieved the sort of distance from his material which the shortened Black Boy implied. Partly for this reason, the full American Hunger—as distinct from the published Black Boy—retains that tentativeness which is the hallmark of the open autobiography.

In addition, the omitted second section of the autobiography expresses the tensions, the unresolved conflicts, of the first. American Hunger is the story, chiefly, of Wright's unsatisfying relationship with the Communist Party. Here, the themes of black and white are more subdued, but the theme of hunger persists and becomes more elaborate and universal. Of course, the question of black and white as a simple issue of race continues, but as Wright notes, he now feels “a different sort of tension,”⁷ a different kind of “insecurity” (p. 3). The distinction now is likely to be animal and human, dirty and clean. A re-consideration of Black Boy's epigraph will best illustrate the qualities of the omitted section and its relationship to the whole.

The epigraph from Job which prefaced Black Boy was originally meant to summarize the entire American Hunger. The first line, “They meet with darkness in the daytime,” as shown above, summarizes the action of Black Boy. The second line, “And they grope at noonday as in the night, …” although not denying the content of Black Boy, more properly applies to the second section of the book. When Wright first enters a John Reed Club, it seems that neither he nor the members of the club need to grope; they ignore his blackness, and he feels for the first time totally human. But soon they begin to reduce his humanity in other ways. The Communists thwart his attempts to write biographies of their black members. “I had embraced their aims with the freest impulse I had ever known. I, the chary cynic, the man who had felt that no idea on earth was worthy of self-sacrifice, had publicly identified myself with them, and now their suspicion of me hit me with a terrific impact, froze me within. I groped in the noon sun” (p. 86). The isolation Wright feels is different from what he experienced in the South, but it is in some ways more terrible. He is still blind, groping even in the sunshine.

Wright had also picked separate epigraphs and titles for each of the subdivisions of the original American Hunger, and when these are properly replaced, they reassert the anxiety, hunger, and searching. In its original form, Black Boy-American Hunger had specific titles for each book, and each book carried a separate epigraph. Black Boy was to be called “Southern Night,” and its epigraph was also from Job: “His strength shall be hunger-bitten, / And destruction shall be ready at his side.”⁸ The dark imagery of the “Southern Night” fulfilled its title, as did its violence and hunger. The second part was to be called “The Horror and the Glory,” and its epigraph came from a Negro Folk Song:

Sometimes I wonder, huh,
Wonder if other people wonder, huh,
Sometimes I wonder, huh,
Wonder if other people wonder, huh,
Just like I do, oh my Lord, just like I do!

This brief verse indicates tentativeness, indecision, and a total lack of communication. In company with this resistance to conclusiveness, Wright emphasizes throughout his sense of wonder, his innocence: “how wide and innocent were my eyes, as round and open and dew-wet as morning-glories” (p. 111). Besides elaborating on its epigraph, the section called “The Horror and the Glory” explicitly defines its subtitle. In a climactic scene toward the end of the book, Wright's friend Ross confesses in an open trial that he has fought the policies of his fellow Communists. The glory of this moment is that Ross “had shared and accepted the vision that had crushed him” (p. 124), the vision that all men are equal and sharing in a communal world. But the horror is that this vision has been oversimplified by its followers, that they have allowed the Party to truncate their abilities to think. Wright says, “This, to me, was a spectacle of glory; and yet, because it had condemned me, because it was blind and ignorant, I felt that it was a spectacle of horror” (p. 125). Wright is a writer, and as such it is his business to search deep into the human heart, to name blindness when he sees it. This is of necessity a lonely search, and a complex one. Like the protagonist of “The Man Who Lived Underground,” which Wright was working on during the years when he was finishing American Hunger, a writer may find himself separate from the rest, observing, innocent, condemned.

The final pages of the full American Hunger, unlike those of the revised Black Boy, do not in fact explain how Wright managed to separate himself from his black confrères in the south, how he became a writer. They do not even hint at his future successes, but rather at his sense of quest, and as Michel Fabre has put it, his feeling that the quest was unfinished and perhaps unfinishable. Wright did not plan to create in his readers nor to accept in himself a feeling of satisfaction, but of hunger, “a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all” (p. 135). Here, too, Wright returns to his imagery of darkness and light: “Perhaps, I thought, out of my tortured feelings I could fling a spark into this darkness” (p. 134). The terminology is similar to Conrad's at the end of Heart of Darkness, with reference to the continent before him and its immensity. Wright no longer believes in the Communist vision, no longer yearns for what Fishbelly's father in The Long Dream calls “the dream that can't come true,”⁹ asserts that he is working “Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity.” Wright knows that his effort is tentative and minimal, but also that he must try to write on the “white paper”: “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human” (p. 135). This statement is an admission that Wright cannot produce a work that is neat and conclusive, and as a result the content and effect of these final pages clash with the revised ending of Black Boy.

To understand why Wright's conclusion to Black Boy is so mismatched with the deliberate inconclusiveness of his full autobiography, one must consider in detail the events surrounding its writing. After the extraordinary success of Native Son in 1940, Wright turned to a novel about women, servants, and the problem of those who attempt to pass for white. This novel was never to be finished, but he was working at it consistently until 9 April 1943, when he gave a talk at Fisk University in Nashville. He had not prepared his remarks in advance, and he decided at the last minute to talk about his own life, to be honest with his audience. After the publication of Black Boy, he recounted this experience:

I gave a clumsy, conversational kind of speech to the folks, white and black, reciting what I felt and thought about the world; what I remembered about my life, about being a Negro. There was but little applause. Indeed, the audience was terribly still, and it was not until I was halfway through my speech that it crashed upon me that I was saying things that Negroes were not supposed to say publicly, things that whites had forbidden Negroes to say. What made me realize this was a hysterical, half-repressed, tense kind of laughter that went up now and then from the white and black faces.¹⁰

This experience convinced him that he ought to finish the book about his own life which he had long been writing in pieces. “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” for instance, written in 1937, he would eventually transport bodily into his autobiography.¹¹ The book which he now set out to write, although revised, shaped, and ordered, was primarily an effort to tell the truth, not to convince a particular audience, black or white. Indeed, Wright wrote to his editor at Harper's, Edward Aswell, about a juvenile edition of Black Boy that “I'm just too self-conscious when I write for a special audience.”¹² He could not finish the juvenile edition.

The search for truth, for as much truth as one can possibly set down, is the primary motive of a writer of an open as opposed to a defined autobiography. He is not trying primarily to please an audience, to create an aesthetically satisfying whole, but to look into his heart. This attempt is perhaps the most difficult a writer can undertake, requiring as Wright put it in his Fisk speech “real hard terror.”

If you try it, you will find at times sweat will break out upon you. You will find that even if you succeed in discounting the attitudes of others to you and your life, you must wrestle with yourself most of all, fight with yourself; for there will surge up in you a strong desire to alter facts, to dress up your feelings. You'll find that there are many things that you don't want to admit about yourself or others. As your record shapes itself up, an awed wonder haunts you. And yet there is no more exciting an adventure than trying to be honest in this way. The clean, strong feeling that sweeps you when you've done it, makes you know that. … Well, it's quite inexplicable.¹³

When Wright had at last, through a multitude of drafts, faced and finished these truths and these terrors, he forwarded his manuscript to his agent, Paul Reynolds. Reynolds sent the manuscript, which was at that moment called “Black Hunger,” to Harper's, where Aswell was expecting the novel about the problems of attempting to “pass.” Aswell instantly recognized the autobiography's worth, however, and within three days had sent an advance. By this time the title was American Hunger. The unsigned reader's notes (presumably Aswell's) preserved in the Harper papers suggest, among other things, that Wright cut out some of the John Reed section. The reader adds, “I may be wrong but I personally would like to see some of this cut and the story carried on to the years of Wright's success—perhaps to the writing of Native Son. His own feeling of hope, his own preservation through adversity would somehow be justified as it is not here.”¹⁴ It is an editor's business to ask that even lives be given justification, that order be imposed, that readers be given a sense of wholeness and completion. The suggestion that the autobiography be brought up to Native Son was somehow dropped, but Wright cut the John Reed section as much as he could. He rewrote the ending, but it resisted closure: “I tried and tried to strengthen the ending. One thing is certain, I cannot step outside of the mood rendered there and say anything without its sounding false. So, what I've done is this: I've expanded the end to deepen the mood, to hint at some kind of emotional resolution.”¹⁵ The book moved toward its final stages. Wright objected to the phrase “courageous Negro” in the jacket copy and asked that it be changed to “Negro American,” which “keeps the book related to the American scene and emphasizes the oneness of impulse, the singleness of aim of both black and white Americans.”¹⁶ Wright's emphasis, once again, is on a general audience. He is trying to tell the truth, avoiding the need to mask, modify, change, which had characterized his life in white America. He is deviating from the model of the black slave narrative, which moved teleologically from slavery into freedom, from dehumanization to fulfillment. The pressure to round out the book was strong, but Wright successfully resisted.

The further metamorphosis, the addition of the final six pages to Black Boy, took place in the Spring of 1944, after American Hunger in its entirety had been forwarded to the Book-of-the-Month Club. There, the judges said that they would accept the book on condition that the second section be cut off and the first section be provided with more complete resolution. On 26 June, Aswell forwarded a draft of the new conclusion in which Wright had “tried to carry out a suggestion made by Mr. Fadiman to the effect that he summarize briefly, and make explicit, the meaning that is now implicit in the preceding pages.”¹⁷

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who had written the introduction for Native Son, urged Wright to expand somewhat on his first draft, and to seek out the American sources for his feelings of hope. “From what other source than from the basic tradition of our country could the soul of an American have been filled with that ‘hazy notion’ that life could be lived with dignity? Could it be that even from inside the prison of injustice, through the barred windows of that Bastille of racial oppression, Richard Wright had caught a glimpse of the American flag?”¹⁸ With America at war, this spirit of patriotism was the general mood, and elsewhere Fisher contrasts American freedom with Nazi repression. Reflecting similar fervor, Aswell's list of possible titles for the truncated first half of American Hunger includes besides fifteen evocations of darkness such as “Raw Hunger” and “The Valley of Fear,” these familiar complacencies: “Land of the Free” and “Land of Liberty.”¹⁹ Wright replied that the Negro environment was such that very few could intuit the American way. Even these could desire nothing specific; they could feel only a hope, a hunger. He emphasized that accident, not fate or choice, had more often than not governed his own life. However, Fisher had suggested that Wright consider which American books might have influenced him, given him a vision of America which had inspired him. In response to this request, Wright added two more paragraphs. One defined his hope—or more precisely refused to define his hope, showing that he was simply running away from violence and darkness, not toward anything he could formulate. The second paragraph had to do with his reading. Although Wright was careful to emphasize that his reading had been accidental, that the books were alien, that Dreiser, Masters, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis were critical of the American environment, he did give his hope a nearer reality. Even so, as mentioned above, he called it “a warmth from an unseen light,” a phrase which Fisher praised with special emphasis. Wright had actually transported this phrase from American Hunger, where it appeared in a much more nebulous context: “Even so, I floundered, staggered; but somehow I always groped my way back to that path where I felt a tinge of warmth from an unseen light” (p. 25). Here there is blindness, the groping of the epigraph, and a tiny waft of hope. The Black Boy context, too, mentions groping, but the rhetoric is more assured, the feeling more triumphant.

Indeed, Wright realized that American Hunger was no longer an appropriate title for this transformed autobiography. The Book-of-the-Month Club suggested “The First Chapter,” which would have emphasized the initiation theme and implied a sequel, but this choice seemed jejune. Wright himself eventually suggested Black Boy; and his accompanying comment emphasizes the unity he had attained by truncating his book: “Now, this is not very original, but I think it covers the book. It is honest. Straight. And many people say it to themselves when they see a Negro and wonder how he lives. … Black Boy seems to me to be not only a title, but also a kind of heading of the whole general theme.”²⁰ His suggested subtitles, however, retained the sense of process. Nearly all of them contained the word “anxiety.” Eventually, however, the subtitle too reflected the pose of completeness. Black Boy became A Record of Childhood and Youth.

No one will ever know how the original American Hunger would have fared after publication, but Black Boy became an instant best-seller. In 1945 it ranked fourth among non-fiction sales.²¹ The content was new and shocking, but even so, many readers noted the hopeful ending. Responses ranged from outrage through misunderstanding and biased readings to unalleviated praise. Senator Bilbo attacked the book from the right and Ben Burns hacked away at it from the left. Black opinion was divided over Wright's frequently sharp comments about members of his own race. Orville Prescott recognized and disliked some of the elements of open autobiography and downgraded the book for its inclusiveness, criticizing Wright's “excessive determination to omit nothing, to emphasize mere filth.” Although we have seen that this inclusiveness was a deliberate and necessary choice, Prescott decided that it sprang “from a lack of artistic discrimination and selectivity.”²² Milton Mayer made a similar criticism, defining the book's genre as “history.”²³ Lewis Gannett, claiming that “Black Boy may be one of the great American autobiographies,” saw a double America in the book much like Dorothy Canfield Fisher's: “This, too is America: both the mud and scum in which Richard Wright grew up, and the something that sang within him, that ever since has been singing with an ever clearer, painfully sweeter, voice.”²⁴ Many others used Wright's subsequent career as a defining measure, seeing in his earlier experiences the seeds of his genius. One typical review ended: “Soon after this discovery of the great world of books, we find our black boy born of the Mississippi plantation, now nineteen, packing up his bags for new worlds and horizons in the North. The rest of the story is well-known.”²⁵ Readers of Black Boy, no matter what their race or persuasion, often made the easy leap from the trip North to best-sellerdom and success.

But for Wright himself this leap was not easy, as readers of American Hunger know. Although pieces of the end of the original American Hunger were published in the Atlantic Monthly and Mademoiselle before Black Boy itself actually appeared, it obviously could not reach as large an audience as Black Boy itself. Constance Webb produced a photo-offset version of the whole manuscript, but this was only privately circulated.²⁶ Even readers who later read most of this material in The God that Failed or in Eight Men²⁷ could not intuit the negative strength of the omitted pages which immediately followed Wright's escape to the North in American Hunger. Nothing short of Wright's opening words can convey the desolation he felt on arriving in his hoped-for paradise: “My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies” (p. 1). Wright did at last find a place where he was comfortable, but it was not Chicago or any other place in the United States. In spite of Mencken, Anderson, Dreiser, Masters, and Lewis, the American dream which Wright could not honestly elicit in the last pages of his Black Boy simply did not exist for him. When Wright arrived in Paris on 15 May 1946, he wrote to his editor at Harper's: “Ed, Paris is all I ever hoped to think it was, with a clear sky, buildings so beautiful with age that one wonders how they happen to be, and with people so assured and friendly and confident that one knows that it took many centuries of living to give them such poise. There is such an absence of race hate that it seems a little unreal. Above all, Paris strikes me as being truly a gentle city, with gentle manners.”²⁸ Here he could live and work as a human being, released from the ungentleness he could never escape in the United States.

In spite of the tentativeness of Wright's ending for Black Boy, in spite of his ultimate emigration, subsequent readers have continued to misread those final pages. Arthur P. Davis, for instance, in From the Dark Tower says, “The book ends … on a note of triumph. Near the close of the work Wright describes his moment of truth.”²⁹ But there was no moment of truth. Similarly, although Stephen Butterfield describes black autobiography in general as reflecting “a kind of cultural schizophrenia, where the author must somehow discover roots in a country which does not accept him as a human being,”³⁰ he defines Black Boy as one of the modern survivals of the pattern of the slave narrative. In support of this argument, he writes, “The slave narrative's basic pattern, it will be remembered, was an escape from South to North as well as a movement up the social scale from the status of slave to that of respected, educated citizen and vanguard of black politics and culture” (pp. 130-31). Without the American Hunger ending, Black Boy is indeed modeled on the slave-narrative pattern, but Wright intended the ending to remain ambiguous, groping, hungry. Unfortunately the pattern absorbs the deviating elements, and only an unusually careful reader will notice the hesitancy in the final pages, the conditional verbs, the haltered rhetoric, the mention of luck.

In 1977, seventeen years after Wright's death, Harper and Row published American Hunger as a separate volume, with an afterword by Michel Fabre giving a brief outline of its publishing history. Fabre objected to the disjoining of the two parts of the original autobiography, observing, “Black Boy is commonly construed as a typical success story, and thus it has been used by the American liberal to justify his own optimism regarding his country” (p. 140). The rhetoric is strong, but the point is valid, and indeed it is more generally true than Fabre implies. Davis and Butterfield also misread Black Boy, and they cannot easily be grouped with “American liberals.” Reviewers of the 1977 American Hunger, those of both races and all political persuasions, generally agreed that reading it changes one's perceptions of Black Boy. Alden Whitman went one step further, arguing that American Hunger did not make sense alone, and suggesting: “It would have been more useful, in my opinion, to have issued Black Boy complete at last, so that the reader could get the full flavor of the autobiography as Wright initially wrote it.”³¹

Many books, through the influence of an editor, have been drastically changed before publication, and the published work is accepted as definitive. What we read is The Waste Land, not “He Do the Police in Three Voices.” It is true that Wright concurred entirely in the division of American Hunger into Black Boy and its sequel, even supplying the new title. But, as I have tried to show here, the change was more drastic than Wright meant it to be; the ultimate significance of the book shifted further than Wright had intended. Black Boy became a more definitive statement than its themes of hope and hunger could support. Therefore, American Hunger needs to be reissued in its entirety, with the final six pages of the present Black Boy given as an appendix. Failing this, every reader of Black Boy should buy both books and read them together, recognizing that the last six pages of Black Boy were added in a final revision in part as a response to wartime patriotism. When combined, both of these books emphasize the lack of conviction, the isolation, and finally the lack of order in Wright's world as he saw it, a sadness and disarray which his truncated autobiography Black Boy, as published, seems at the end to deny.

Notes

1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1968), p. 77. Wherever clear, subsequent citations of works already cited will appear in parentheses in the text.

2. “The Effect of Black/White Imagery in Richard Wright's Black Boy,” Negro-American Literature Forum, 7 (1973), 46-48.

3. Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945; rpt. New York: Harper, 1966), p. 13.

4. Firestone Library, Princeton Univ., Harper Papers, Box 33, Folder 17, TS Letter to Edward Aswell, 14 January 1944; these thirty instances were spread over the whole book, including the section now known as American Hunger. Materials from the Harper Papers are published with permission from Princeton University Library, Harper and Row Publishers, and Paul Reynolds, Inc.

5. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (New York: William Morrow, 1973), p. 251.

6. Richard Wright, quoted in an interview with JKS, “A Searing Picture of Childhood in the South,” Minneapolis Tribune, 4 March 1945; rpt. in Richard Wright: The Critical Reception, ed. John M. Reilly (New York: Burt Franklin, 1978), p. 131.

7. Richard Wright, American Hunger (1977; rpt. New York: Harper, 1983), p. 2.

8. There are many extant copies of the galleys of the original American Hunger. I have used the copy in The Richard Wright Archive Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. This copy of the Author's Proofs, JWJ Wright 20, dated 25-26 April 1944, is complete except for the last page.

9. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 79.

10. “Richard Wright Describes the Birth of Black Boy,” New York Post, 30 Nov. 1944, p. B6.

11. Fabre, Quest, pp. 250-51.

12. Harper Papers, TS, Folder 20, 27 November 1944.

13. “Richard Wright Describes the Birth of Black Boy.”

14. Harper TS, Folder 15.

15. TS Letter to Aswell, 14 Jan. 1944, Harper Folder 17.

16. TS Letter to Aswell, 22 Jan. 1944, Harper Folder 17.

17. TS Letter to Meredith Wood, Harper Folder 18.

18. TS carbon enclosure, 1 July 1944, Harper Folder 18.

19. Harper Folder 19. Wright's replying letter is not available to the general public, but a draft of a response can be found in Beinecke JWJ Wright 10.

20. TS Letter to Aswell, 10 August 1944, Harper Folder 19; Fabre, Quest, p. 254.

21. Fabre, Quest, p. 282.

22. Rev. in New York Times, 28 Feb. 1945, p. 21; rpt. in Reception, ed. Reilly, p. 121.

23. “Richard Wright: Unbreakable Negro,” Progressive, 9 (9 April 1945); rpt. in Reception, ed. Reilly, p. 154.

24. Rev. in New York Herald Tribune, 28 February 1945, p. 17; rpt. in Reception, ed. Reilly, p. 120.

25. James W. Ivy, “American Hunger,” Crisis, 52 (1945), 118; rpt. in Reception, ed. Reilly, p. 159.

26. Fabre, Quest, p. 628.

27. The God that Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York: Harper, 1949); Eight Men, ed. Fabre (Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1961). In the Fabre version of “The Man Who Went to Chicago,” the many parentheses are removed, an undoubted improvement which should be transferred to subsequent editions of American Hunger.

28. TS 15 May 1946, Harper Folder 27.

29. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900-1960 (Washington, D.C.: Howard Univ. Press, 1974), p. 157.

30. Black Autobiography in America (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1974), p. 94.

31. Rev. in Chicago Tribune Book World, 22 May 1977, Sec. 7, p. 1; in Reception, ed. Reilly, p. 376.