| 词条 | Black Boy |
| 释义 |
| name = Black Boy | orig_title = | translator = | image = Black Boy Cover.jpg | caption = First edition | author = Richard Wright | country = United States | language = English | series = | subject = Autobiography, Non-fiction | published = 1945 Harper & Brothers | media_type = Paperback | pages = 419 p. | isbn = 0-06-113024-9 | dewey = 813/.52 B 22 | congress = PS3545.R815 Z96 2006 | oclc = 94572252 | preceded_by = 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States | followed_by = The Outsider }} Black Boy (1945) is a memoir by American author Richard Wright, detailing his youth in the South: Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and his eventual move to Chicago, where he establishes his writing career and becomes involved with the Communist Party in the United States. Plot summaryBlack Boy (American Hunger) is an autobiography following Richard Wright's childhood and young adulthood. It is split into two sections, "Southern Night" (concerning his childhood in the south) and "The Horror and the Glory" (concerning his early adult years in Chicago). "Southern Night"The book begins with a mischievous four-year-old Wright setting fire to his grandmother's house. Wright is a curious child living in a household of strict, religious women and violent, irresponsible men. He quickly chafes against his surroundings, reading instead of playing with other children, and rejecting the church in favor of agnosticism at a young age. He feels more out of place as he grows older and comes in contact with the Jim Crow racism of the 1920s South. He finds these circumstances generally unjust and fights attempts to quell his intellectual curiosity and potential. After his father deserts the family, young Wright is shuffled back and forth between his sick mother, his fanatically religious grandmother, and various maternal aunts and uncles. As he ventures into the white world hoping to find jobs, he encounters extreme racism and brutal violence: experiences that stay with him the rest of his life. While Wright is in search for prosperity, his family is starving and suffering amidst severe poverty. "The Horror and the Glory"Given Richard's family's infatuation with the North as a place of opportunity, Richard and his aunt headed to Chicago as soon as they had the necessary funds. In order to survive daily life in Chicago, Richard resorts to lying and stealing money. The youth finds the North less racist than the South and begins understanding American race relations more deeply. He holds many jobs, most of them consisting of menial tasks. He washes floors during the day and reads Proust and medical journals at night. At this time, his family is still suffering in poverty, his mother is disabled by a stroke, and his relatives constantly annoy him about his atheism and "pointless" reading. He finds a job at the post office, where he meets white men who share his cynical view of the world and religion. They invite him to the John Reed Club, an organization that promotes the arts and social change. He becomes involved with a magazine called Left Front and slowly immerses himself in the writers and artists in the Communist Party. At first he thinks he will find friends within the party, especially among its black members, but he finds them to be just as timid to change as the southern whites he left behind. The Communists fear those who disagree with their ideas and quickly brand Wright as a "counter-revolutionary" for his tendency to question and speak his mind. When Richard tries to leave the party, he is accused of trying to lead others away from it. After witnessing the trial of another black Communist for counter-revolutionary activity, Wright decides to abandon the party. He remains branded an "enemy" of Communism, and party members threaten him away from various jobs and gatherings. He does not fight them because he believes they are clumsily groping toward ideas that he agrees with: unity, tolerance, and equality. Wright ends the book by resolving to use his writing as a way to start a revolution: asserting that everyone has a "hunger" for life that needs to be filled, and for him, writing is his way to the human heart. Publishing historyOriginal PublicationWright wrote the entire manuscript in 1943 under the working title, Black Confession. By December, when Wright delivered the book to his agent, he had changed the title to American Hunger. The first fourteen chapters, about his Mississippi childhood, are compiled in "Part One: Southern Night," and the last six chapters, about Chicago, are included in "Part Two: The Horror and the Glory." In January 1944, Harper and Brothers accepted all twenty chapters, and was for a scheduled fall publication of the book. Partial PublicationsIn June 1944, the Book of the Month Club expressed an interest in only "Part One: Southern Night." In response, Wright agreed to eliminate the Chicago section, and in August, he renamed the shortened book as Black Boy. Harper and Brothers published it under that title in 1945 and it sold 195,000 retail copies in its first edition and 351,000 copies through the Book-of-the-Month Club.[1] Parts of the Chicago chapters were published during Wright's lifetime as magazine articles, but the six chapters were not published together until 1977, by Harper and Row as American Hunger. In 1991, the Library of America published all 20 chapters, as Wright had originally intended, under the title Black Boy (American Hunger) as part of their volume of Wright's Later Works.[1] The Book of the Month Club played an important role in Wright's career. It selected his 1940 novel, Native Son, as the first Book of the Month Club written by a black American.[2] Wright was willing to change his Black Boy book to get a second endorsement. However, he wrote in his journal that the Book of the Month Club had yielded to pressure from the Communist Party in asking him to eliminate the chapters that dealt with his membership in and disillusionment with the Communist Party.[1] CensorshipThe book was banned by the board of education of the Island Trees Union Free School District in New York, which was the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1982. Petitioners described the autobiography as "objectionable" and "improper fare for school students."[3] References1. ^1 2 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., "Note on the Text," pp 407–8 in Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger), The Library of America, 1993. 2. ^Mitgang, Herbert. "Books of the Times; An American Master and New Discoveries." The New York Times 1 January 1992. Accessed on 14 May 2006.[https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEEDC1331F932A35752C0A964958260]. 3. ^{{cite web|title=Island Trees Sch. Dist. v. Pico by Pico 457 U.S. 853 (1982)|url=https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/853/case.html|website=Justia|accessdate=30 September 2015}} External links
6 : African-American autobiographies|1945 books|American autobiographies|Literary autobiographies|Works by Richard Wright (author)|Harper & Brothers books |
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