"I Could Never Really Leave the South": Regionalism and the Transformation of Richard Wright's American Hunger

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

When published in 1945, Black Boy constituted a cannily truncated version of Richard Wright's original autobiography, American Hunger (1993). In the year leading up to the publication of this text, Wright was called upon to revise his narrative to satisfy not only his publisher, but also the Book-of-the-Month Club, which wanted to make his work a selection. In exchange, Wright was led to alter his conclusion and even to delete the section describing his experiences in the North after leaving the South. These changes effectively blunted Wright's broader critique of American race relations and confined Black Boy to a regional narrative of childhood and adolescence. This publishing experience may provide a literary corollary for his personal speculation at the end of Black Boy that deep down, I knew that I could never really leave the South (284). It was not until 1977, after Wright's death, that the missing portion of his autobiography would appear in print. Reexamining the publication history of American Hunger is in order because the scholarship on this subject is inconclusive and lacking in detail. Neither Wright's biographer, Michel Fabre, nor the editors of the Library of America edition of Black Boy,