{"product_id":"black-boy-harper-perennial-olive-editions-9780062421050","title":"Black Boy (Harper Perennial Olive Editions)","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBlack Boy (Harper Perennial Olive Editions)\u003c\/strong\u003e by Wright, Richard. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9780062421050.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA special 75th\nanniversary edition of Richard Wrights powerful and unforgettable memoir, with\na new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the\nauthor’s grandson.\nWhen it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned.\nOrville Prescott of the New York Times\nwrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read\nthem maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater\nunderstanding and a more true democracy.” Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools\nthroughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between\nthe races.”\nWright’s once controversial, now celebrated autobiography\nmeasures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate\nwill it took to survive as a black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse,\nand hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole,\nand raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and blacks resentful\nof anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different\nway of life, he may his way north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he\nforged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with\npencil in hand, determined to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an\necho.” Seventy-five year later, his words continue to reverberate. “To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of\ndarkness,” John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. “Not the dark heart Conrad\nsearched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear.”\n\nOne of the great American memoirs, Wright’s account is a\npoignant record of struggle and endurance—a seminal literary work that\nilluminates our own time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Harper Perennial","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44989737828405,"sku":"ByrdShop_0062421050","price":58.97,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780062421050_81710311-d293-4a5f-8c24-1b59e486c10c.jpg?v=1778683412","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/black-boy-harper-perennial-olive-editions-9780062421050","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}