Black Boy by Richard Wright

A special Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition of Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South—a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering

When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.”