Book Club Guide

Black Boy

by Richard Wright · 1945 · Biography & Memoir

Key themes

The hunger — for food, for books, for a world that acknowledges your existence
Jim Crow as a system that requires Black people to perform their own diminishment
Literature as the thing that saves and simultaneously makes ordinary life impossible

About this book

Richard Wright's autobiographical account of his childhood and youth in the Jim Crow South — the hunger, the violence, the white employer who takes him to a library, the reading that opens a world while making life in Mississippi impossible. One of the great American memoirs and one of the founding texts of the 20th-century Black literary tradition.

Published in 1945, Black Boy was an immediate bestseller and was challenged by the US Senate as 'obscene' and 'Communist.' Wright had already published Native Son (1940). He lived in exile in Paris from 1947 until his death in 1960.

Discussion questions

Wright describes a childhood of physical hunger and social starvation. How does he develop hunger as the memoir's central motif — and what does it become as the memoir progresses?
The library passage — when a white man helps him borrow books using a fake note — is one of the memoir's pivots. What does reading do for Wright — and what does it cost him in his Southern community?
Wright presents himself throughout as proud and unbending — unable to perform the deference Jim Crow required. How does he show the specific psychological cost of this refusal?
The memoir ends with Wright leaving the South for Chicago. How does Ellison's Invisible Man (published several years later) continue or revise the questions Black Boy raises?
Black Boy was written in 1945. Which of its observations about American racism feel most contemporary — and what has changed in the seventy-five years since?