Later Works: Black Boy (American Hunger); The Outsider
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: No dust jacket. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription. Slipcase: good.
Few American writers have confronted the brutality of racial injustice and existential alienation with the unflinching honesty of Richard Wright. This Library of America volume gathers two of his most powerful later works: Black Boy (American Hunger), the searing autobiographical account of Wright's formative years in the Jim Crow South and his restless journey northward in search of dignity and freedom, and The Outsider, a bold existentialist novel following Cross Damon, a Black man who seizes a chance accident to shed his identity entirely — only to find himself drawn into a world of violence, ideology, and moral reckoning. Wright's prose is relentless and unadorned, wielding social realism as both a scalpel and a sledgehammer against the twin tyrannies of racism and oppression. Where Black Boy chronicles lived truth with the visceral immediacy of memoir, The Outsider argues through fiction that no ideology — communist, capitalist, or otherwise — can redeem the modern self from its fundamental isolation. Together, these works illustrate Wright's towering ambition to place the African-American experience at the very centre of the Western literary and philosophical tradition, leaving the reader to question whether freedom, once imagined, can ever truly be reclaimed.
Author: Richard Wright
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: No dust jacket. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription. Slipcase: good.
Few American writers have confronted the brutality of racial injustice and existential alienation with the unflinching honesty of Richard Wright. This Library of America volume gathers two of his most powerful later works: Black Boy (American Hunger), the searing autobiographical account of Wright's formative years in the Jim Crow South and his restless journey northward in search of dignity and freedom, and The Outsider, a bold existentialist novel following Cross Damon, a Black man who seizes a chance accident to shed his identity entirely — only to find himself drawn into a world of violence, ideology, and moral reckoning. Wright's prose is relentless and unadorned, wielding social realism as both a scalpel and a sledgehammer against the twin tyrannies of racism and oppression. Where Black Boy chronicles lived truth with the visceral immediacy of memoir, The Outsider argues through fiction that no ideology — communist, capitalist, or otherwise — can redeem the modern self from its fundamental isolation. Together, these works illustrate Wright's towering ambition to place the African-American experience at the very centre of the Western literary and philosophical tradition, leaving the reader to question whether freedom, once imagined, can ever truly be reclaimed.