Monday, January 8, 2024

All Time 100 Nonfiction Books / No 2 / Black Boy by Richard Wright

 



All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books 

No 002


Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine


Black Boy by Richard Wright


One of the most prominent African-American writers of the 20th century, Richard Wright illuminated and defined midcentury discussions of race in America. Black Boy, his coming-of-age autobiography published in 1945, is divided into two parts: “Southern Night” traces his violent childhood in the segregated South as he grapples with religion, bigotry and family tragedy; “The Horror and the Glory” follows him through young adulthood, his move to Chicago and his initiation into the Communist Party during the Great Depression. Wright soon became disenchanted with the party’s inertia and interparty politics, and he left the fold in 1942. But he held onto his idealistic belief in writing as a vehicle for change — a belief that powers Black Boy, which uses novelistic techniques to chart a young writer’s journey into manhood.


TIME


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