Richard Wright , Vol. 2

Later Works (Black Boy (American Hunger), The Outsider)

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by Richard A. Wright,

Edited by Arnold Rampersad

Penguin USA

Due/Published June 1991, 877 pages, cloth

ISBN 0940450674

Wright's wrenching memoir Black Boy, an eloquent account of his struggle to escape a life of poverty, ignorance, and fear in his native South, was an immediate bestseller when it apperaed in 1945. But Wright's complete autobiography, published for the first time in this volume as Black Boy (American Hunger), is a far more complex and probing work.

Richard Wright's novel The Outsider (1953) appears here in text that restores the many stylistic changes and long cuts made by his editors without his knowledge. This text, based on Wright's final corrected typescript, casts new light on his development of the style he called "poetic realism."

(Library of America)