American Hunger (17 page)

Reynolds reacted enthusiastically. Edward Aswell, Wright’s editor at Harper’s and his well-heeded friendly adviser, accepted the book at once and scheduled its publication for the fall of 1944. It was Aswell who suggested the subtitle “The Biography of a Courageous Negro,” to which Wright preferred “The Biography of an American Negro.” On January 22, 1944, he wrote Aswell: “I would let the reader decide if I have been courageous or not. I think the phrase ‘Negro American’ keeps the book related to the American scene and emphasizes the oneness of impulse, the singleness of aim of both black and white Americans.” This reveals that Wright’s criticism of the United States was cultural in a large sense, not merely racial.

By mid-1944 the autobiography had been set in page proofs and a jacket was ready for
American Hunger.
In the meantime, the Book-of-the-Month Club, which had been considering the work, finally accepted it as a dual selection for March 1945. It is not quite clear whether the club accepted the autobiography on
the condition that it would include only Wright’s experiences in the South, or whether Aswell himself made the suggestion. At any rate, as early as January 1944 Aswell had expressed the view that Wright should publish the first section of his autobiography separately and develop his Chicago and New York experiences into another volume. Wright seems to have agreed to do so at the time.

On August 10, 1944, Wright wrote Aswell and suggested
Black Boy
as a title for the book in its new form. Not only, he wrote, was he unable to find a better one but he considered this to be “not only a title but also a kind of heading to the whole general theme.” The eight different subtitles that he also provided all articulated the Southern character of his childhood and the anxiety that had pervaded it, thus stressing the traumatic effect of the South upon black life. From Quebec, where he was vacationing at the end of August, Wright further suggested to Aswell that the review that Dorothy Canfield Fisher had written for the Book-of-the-Month Club
Bulletin
should serve as an introduction. It is clear, then, that Wright saw no objection to the publication of
Black Boy
(that is, the first part of the original autobiographical manuscript) as a separate work and that he readily complied with the request for a new conclusion that would sum up his growth in the South. Apart from that, and the deletion of a couple of paragraphs containing four-letter words, no changes were made in the original page proofs.

Extracts from the unpublished section of the autobiography appeared in the 1940s, relating Wright’s early days in Chicago, his first steps as a creative writer, and his uneasy relationship with the Communist party. Brought together for the first time and, more important, put back into the organic flow of Wright’s narrative, these episodes are rich with the complexity of Wright’s intent. They evidence his simultaneous grappling with problems of the craft and his search for meaningful political involvement,
and they vibrate with the violence of his outbursts against the frustrations of his daily life. At the same time they show Wright’s attempt to invest his personal struggle with global meaning. Similar energy is apparent in Wright’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge and self-expression. His setting himself to reading Gertrude Stein’s
Three Lives
at the end of a nerve-racking day in the Chicago post office suggests the same intensity of commitment as his borrowing Mencken’s
Prejudices
from the Memphis Public Library on a forged card. We may be tempted to smile at his somewhat naïve consideration of Proust as an example to emulate, yet we marvel at the strength of his motivation when he acknowledges:

Similar eagerness appears in Wright’s desire to communicate with his fellow John Reed Club members, to militate for the cause of left-wing writing, and to be accepted in the local C.P. unit. Such frustration pervades, moreover, the narration of unsuccessful personal encounters or club meetings where progressive policies were defeated. Are we then to regret that
American Hunger
takes us far from the hopeful and potentially rosy ending of
Black Boy?
Indeed, it constitutes a more profound questioning of man’s predicament in a mass consumption society whose daily practice negates its humanistic pretenses. There is no redemption for
human suffering in a culture governed by the “lust for trash.” Wright’s impossible adjustment to the autocracy of state or party, his refusal of the mediocre prizes of so-called democracy thus assume tragic intensity. What road could he have taken in the mid 1940s? Going beyond the debunking of social myths which he attempted in “The Man Who Lived Underground,” he proceeded to pose the question of the aims of civilization. His autobiography thus opens onto the Nietzschean reaches of his metaphysical novel,
The Outsider.
This endows
American Hunger
with a dimension which
Black Boy
as such never possessed, for Wright not only addresses the materialism of the South, of the United States, of Western culture; he speaks to the whole of mankind in calling for radical awareness and change. In a letter to Antonio Frasconi, a South American artist, written in November 1944, about the time he had completed
Black Boy,
Wright proclaims:

M
ICHEL
F
ABRE

Professor of American
and Afro-American Studies,
The Sorbonne

A page of the original manuscript of
American Hunger,
bearing Richard Wright’s editing. The material corresponds to page 61 in this volume.

^*
Wright is referring here to the original two-part work

The book published here was originally included by Richard Wright as the second part of an autobiography entitled
American Hunger.
Its working title was “The Horror and the Glory.”

The two parts were separated prior to publication and the first part was published in 1945 as
Black Boy,
the second apparently being intended for publication at a later date. Portions of the second section saw scattered publication in the 1940s, but with this volume it now appears intact for the first time.

Anyone who has read Richard Wright’s
Black Boy
knows it to be one of the great American autobiographies. Covering Wright’s earlv life in the South, the book concludes with his departure in 1934 for a new life in the North.
American Hunger
(first published more than thirty years after the appearance of Black Boy) is the continuation of that story. A vital, richly anecdotal work,
American Hunger
treats with feeling and often with wry humor Wright’s struggle to make his way in the North—in Chicago—as a store clerk, dishwasher, and eventually as a writer.

He deals movingly with his early days in the Communist Party and with his attempts to keep his integrity in the face of Party demands that he subordinate his artistic goals to its needs. And he recounts with a mixture of pain and irony his break with the Party and the tortured period of ostracism that followed. There is an unsettling and totally frank personal story here, and a lot of raw social history as well.

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A portion of this work originally appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly
and
Dissent.

A hardcover edition of this book was published by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. in 1977.

AMERICAN HUNGER
. Copyright 1944 by Richard Wright. Copyright © 1977 by Ellen Wright. Afterword copyright © 1977 by Michel Fabre.

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