Black Boy

Wright’s work reflects the influence of Black autobiography in America, yet his commitment to realism and naturalism represents a new direction for the genre.

At its inception, Black American autobiography was bound up in efforts to intervene in a political system that cast Black Americans as Other. Early work by writers like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Phillis Wheatley emphasized the humanity and culture of the enslaved and formerly enslaved, the hypocrisy of white Christian Americans who were complicit in slavery, and the negative impact of slavery on every aspect of Black American culture and life. These works, largely published in the nineteenth century, usually developed themes such as the use of literacy to achieve physical and psychological freedom, the responsibility of the individual Black person to his or her racial community, the tensions that could sometimes arise between the self and community, and the relationship between geography and identity.

Those conventions are certainly present in Black Boy, with some shifts in representation that reflect the changed historical context of Jim Crow in the twentieth century. Black people are still Others in Wright’s account of his early life.