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“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 a 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.”

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