As boy in the segregated South, author Richard Wright was determined to borrow books from the public library. His story illustrates the power of determination in turning a dream into reality. Full color.

Based on a experience from Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, the 17-year-old African American, borrows a white man's library card and devours every book as a ticket to freedom

As boy in the segregated South, young Richard Wright--now a noted American author--was determined to borrow books from the public library. Named a Smithsonian magazine Notable Book for Children. Color illustrations throughout.

The lives of four young people in different circumstances are changed by their encounters with books. Four humorous, poignant stories about how books changed the lives of several youngsters.

A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson. When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.” Wright’s once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and Blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he headed north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.” Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate. “To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness,” John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. “Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear.” One of the great American memoirs, Wright’s account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance—a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time.

Richard Wright is one of the most important African American writers. He is also one of the most prolific. Best known as the author of Native Son, he wrote 7 novels; 2 collections of short fiction; an autobiography; more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays; some 4,000 verses; a photo-documentary; and 3 travel books. By attacking the taboos and hypocrisy that other writers had failed to address, he revolutionized American literature and created a disturbing and realistic portrait of the African American experience. This encyclopedia is a guide to his vast and influential body of works.

Richard Wright's major themes in both fiction and nonfiction -- freedom, existential horror, and black nationalism--are here discussed for the first time in a book-length critical work. Although Wright's fame never diminished in Europe, at the time of his death in 1960 he had long since been dismissed in America as a phenomenally successful Negro author of the thirties and forties whose "protest" literature had subsequently become unfashionable. But, as Edward Margolies illustrates, Wright is important both for his literary achievements and as a Negro spokesman of the 1940's who fairly accurately pre­dicted the events of the 1960's, having studied their causes. Alienation, dread, fear, and the view that one must construct oneself out of the chaos of existence--all elements of his fiction--were for Wright a means of survival and constituted a bond with the existentialist authors Camus and Sartre with whom he was sometimes associated in France in the late forties.