Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth is American writer Richard Wright’s classic memoir about coming of age as a Black man in the Jim Crow South and his migration to Chicago. Harper published Part 1 in 1945 as Black Boy and Part 2, which focuses on Wright’s experiences in the Communist Party in Chicago, in 1977 as American Hunger; Library of America published the combined memoir in 1991. The 1945 edition cemented Wright’s reputation as one of the most important writers of his generation. This guide is based on the Harper Perennial print edition published in 1998.

Summary

The memoir is divided into two sections, Part 1: “Southern Night,” and Part 2: “The Horror and the Glory.”

Part 1 recounts Wright’s early life from the age of 4, when he sets his grandmother’s house on fire, to his move to Chicago in 1927. Wright describes his early life as deprived and traumatic, marred by his family’s extreme poverty, the desertion of the family by Wright’s father, and several strokes that almost completely disabled Wright’s mother. These events lead to a series of moves to live with family members in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, with the bulk of those years spent living in Mississippi with Margaret Wilson, Wright’s grandmother.

Hunger is Wright’s constant companion during these years, and he is on a constant search for sustenance and safety. Wright finds life with his extended family to be tumultuous. His grandmother is a devout Seventh Day Adventist who insists that Wright abide by her religious beliefs and sees his early interest in literature and street culture as blasphemous. Wright’s hysterical and sometimes violent responses to the family members’ attempts to exercise authority over him make him a barely tolerated interloper in the homes of the family members who take him in.

During these years, Wright attends school only intermittently. Wright comes to understand how few his opportunities are because he is Black and poor. He also comes to believe that words and literature are a means of communicating his predicament. He becomes a voracious reader and writes his first short story, which he publishes in a Jackson, Mississippi newspaper, to the disapproval of his religious family members. Wright graduates with honors from high school in 1925 but is forced to end his formal education. Desperate to leave Mississippi, he robs a local college and engages in fraud to raise money needed for travel.

Wright moves to Memphis with his mother and brother. In Memphis, Wright struggles with racism in the workplace. In 1927, he discovers the work of American journalist and essayist H.L. Mencken and decides that writing will offer him the best opportunity for combatting racial and economic inequality. He reads deeply in the fields of sociology and psychology because they offer him the most insight into the racial predicament of Black Americans.

In Part 2, “The Horror and the Glory,” Wright recounts how he at last makes it to the Chicago in 1927. Wright works a series of jobs—dishwasher, delivery boy, and temporary postal clerk. He briefly works full-time for the US Postal Service, but the job ends with the arrival of the Great Depression.

Watching people stand in relief lines, Wright discovers Communism and its analysis of the ability of organized workers to change the circumstances of the laboring class. Wright joins the Chicago John Reed Club, a Communist Party organization designed to recruit artists to advance the Communist perspective. Wright finds that his commitment to artistic autonomy and to creating a more nuanced take on the Black experience as an American underclass place him on a collision course with the party leadership.

Wright’s problems with the party lead to conflict with Communists at work and his firing from one Federal Writers Project position. By then, Wright has already published poetry, essays, and short stories that establish his early reputation as a writer. After watching the party drum out leading Black members, Wright attempts to leave the party on his own terms in 1936. His rupture with the party is complete after party members beat him to prevent him from marching with them in a May Day parade. Wright vows from that moment on that he will focus on writing alone to connect himself and his racial community to the larger world.