Author: Gavin Jones
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
American Hungers
Author: Gavin Jones
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
American Hunger
Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062041509
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Book Description
The compelling continuation of Richard Wright's great autobiographical work, Black Boy Anyone who has read Richard Wright's Black Boy knows it to be one of the great American autobiographies. Covering Wright's early 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.
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062041509
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Book Description
The compelling continuation of Richard Wright's great autobiographical work, Black Boy Anyone who has read Richard Wright's Black Boy knows it to be one of the great American autobiographies. Covering Wright's early 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.
Big Hunger
Author: Andrew Fisher
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535165
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361
Book Description
How to focus anti-hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income inequality. Food banks and food pantries have proliferated in response to an economic emergency. The loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the recession of the early 1980s and Reagan administration cutbacks in federal programs led to an explosion in the growth of food charity. This was meant to be a stopgap measure, but the jobs never came back, and the “emergency food system” became an industry. In Big Hunger, Andrew Fisher takes a critical look at the business of hunger and offers a new vision for the anti-hunger movement. From one perspective, anti-hunger leaders have been extraordinarily effective. Food charity is embedded in American civil society, and federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty programs have been eliminated or slashed. But anti-hunger advocates are missing an essential element of the problem: economic inequality driven by low wages. Reliant on corporate donations of food and money, anti-hunger organizations have failed to hold business accountable for offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural communities, and resisting wage increases. They have become part of a “hunger industrial complex” that seems as self-perpetuating as the more famous military-industrial complex. Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535165
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361
Book Description
How to focus anti-hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income inequality. Food banks and food pantries have proliferated in response to an economic emergency. The loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the recession of the early 1980s and Reagan administration cutbacks in federal programs led to an explosion in the growth of food charity. This was meant to be a stopgap measure, but the jobs never came back, and the “emergency food system” became an industry. In Big Hunger, Andrew Fisher takes a critical look at the business of hunger and offers a new vision for the anti-hunger movement. From one perspective, anti-hunger leaders have been extraordinarily effective. Food charity is embedded in American civil society, and federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty programs have been eliminated or slashed. But anti-hunger advocates are missing an essential element of the problem: economic inequality driven by low wages. Reliant on corporate donations of food and money, anti-hunger organizations have failed to hold business accountable for offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural communities, and resisting wage increases. They have become part of a “hunger industrial complex” that seems as self-perpetuating as the more famous military-industrial complex. Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.
All the Wild Hungers
Author: Karen Babine
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1571319832
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 110
Book Description
A “lovely” memoir of caring for a mother with cancer, reflecting on our appetites for food and for life (Minneapolis Star Tribune). When her mother is diagnosed with a rare cancer, Karen Babine—cook, collector of vintage cast iron, and fiercely devoted daughter, sister, and aunt—can’t help but wonder: feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for cancer? And so she commits to preparing her mother anything she will eat, a vegetarian diving into the unfamiliar world of bone broth and pot roast. In this series of mini-essays, Babine ponders the intimate connections between food, family, and illness. As she notes that her sister’s unborn baby is the size of lemon while her mother’s tumor is the size of a cabbage, she reflects on what draws us toward food metaphors to describe disease. What is the power of language, of naming, in a medical culture where patients are too often made invisible? How do we seek meaning where none is to be found—and can we create it from scratch? And how, Babine asks as she bakes cookies with her small niece and nephew, does a family create its own food culture across generations? Generous and bittersweet, All the Wild Hungers is an affecting chronicle of one family’s experience of illness and of a writer's culinary attempt to make sense of the inexplicable. “[Babine] continues to navigate her way through extraordinary challenges with ordinary comforts, finding poetry in the everyday. Reading this quiet book should provide the sort of balm for those in similar circumstances that writing it must have for the author.”―Kirkus Reviews “Profound…Anyone who has experienced a family member’s struggle with cancer will be stabbed by recognition throughout this book…In the end, the overriding hunger referred to in this lovely book’s title is the hunger for life.”―Minneapolis Star Tribune
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1571319832
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 110
Book Description
A “lovely” memoir of caring for a mother with cancer, reflecting on our appetites for food and for life (Minneapolis Star Tribune). When her mother is diagnosed with a rare cancer, Karen Babine—cook, collector of vintage cast iron, and fiercely devoted daughter, sister, and aunt—can’t help but wonder: feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for cancer? And so she commits to preparing her mother anything she will eat, a vegetarian diving into the unfamiliar world of bone broth and pot roast. In this series of mini-essays, Babine ponders the intimate connections between food, family, and illness. As she notes that her sister’s unborn baby is the size of lemon while her mother’s tumor is the size of a cabbage, she reflects on what draws us toward food metaphors to describe disease. What is the power of language, of naming, in a medical culture where patients are too often made invisible? How do we seek meaning where none is to be found—and can we create it from scratch? And how, Babine asks as she bakes cookies with her small niece and nephew, does a family create its own food culture across generations? Generous and bittersweet, All the Wild Hungers is an affecting chronicle of one family’s experience of illness and of a writer's culinary attempt to make sense of the inexplicable. “[Babine] continues to navigate her way through extraordinary challenges with ordinary comforts, finding poetry in the everyday. Reading this quiet book should provide the sort of balm for those in similar circumstances that writing it must have for the author.”―Kirkus Reviews “Profound…Anyone who has experienced a family member’s struggle with cancer will be stabbed by recognition throughout this book…In the end, the overriding hunger referred to in this lovely book’s title is the hunger for life.”―Minneapolis Star Tribune
No Useless Mouth
Author: Rachel B. Herrmann
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501716123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
"Rachel B. Herrmann's No Useless Mouth is truly a breath of fresh air in the way it aligns food and hunger as the focal point of a new lens to reexamine the American Revolution. Her careful scrutiny, inclusive approach, and broad synthesis―all based on extensive archival research―produced a monograph simultaneously rich, audacious, insightful, lively, and provocative."―The Journal of American History In the era of the American Revolution, the rituals of diplomacy between the British, Patriots, and Native Americans featured gifts of food, ceremonial feasts, and a shared experience of hunger. When diplomacy failed, Native Americans could destroy food stores and cut off supply chains in order to assert authority. Black colonists also stole and destroyed food to ward off hunger and carve out tenuous spaces of freedom. Hunger was a means of power and a weapon of war. In No Useless Mouth, Rachel B. Herrmann argues that Native Americans and formerly enslaved black colonists ultimately lost the battle against hunger and the larger struggle for power because white British and United States officials curtailed the abilities of men and women to fight hunger on their own terms. By describing three interrelated behaviors—food diplomacy, victual imperialism, and victual warfare—the book shows that, during this tumultuous period, hunger prevention efforts offered strategies to claim power, maintain communities, and keep rival societies at bay. Herrmann shows how Native Americans, free blacks, and enslaved peoples were "useful mouths"—not mere supplicants for food, without rights or power—who used hunger for cooperation and violence, and took steps to circumvent starvation. Her wide-ranging research on black Loyalists, Iroquois, Cherokee, Creek, and Western Confederacy Indians demonstrates that hunger creation and prevention were tools of diplomacy and warfare available to all people involved in the American Revolution. Placing hunger at the center of these struggles foregrounds the contingency and plurality of power in the British Atlantic during the Revolutionary Era. Thanks to generous funding from Cardiff University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501716123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
"Rachel B. Herrmann's No Useless Mouth is truly a breath of fresh air in the way it aligns food and hunger as the focal point of a new lens to reexamine the American Revolution. Her careful scrutiny, inclusive approach, and broad synthesis―all based on extensive archival research―produced a monograph simultaneously rich, audacious, insightful, lively, and provocative."―The Journal of American History In the era of the American Revolution, the rituals of diplomacy between the British, Patriots, and Native Americans featured gifts of food, ceremonial feasts, and a shared experience of hunger. When diplomacy failed, Native Americans could destroy food stores and cut off supply chains in order to assert authority. Black colonists also stole and destroyed food to ward off hunger and carve out tenuous spaces of freedom. Hunger was a means of power and a weapon of war. In No Useless Mouth, Rachel B. Herrmann argues that Native Americans and formerly enslaved black colonists ultimately lost the battle against hunger and the larger struggle for power because white British and United States officials curtailed the abilities of men and women to fight hunger on their own terms. By describing three interrelated behaviors—food diplomacy, victual imperialism, and victual warfare—the book shows that, during this tumultuous period, hunger prevention efforts offered strategies to claim power, maintain communities, and keep rival societies at bay. Herrmann shows how Native Americans, free blacks, and enslaved peoples were "useful mouths"—not mere supplicants for food, without rights or power—who used hunger for cooperation and violence, and took steps to circumvent starvation. Her wide-ranging research on black Loyalists, Iroquois, Cherokee, Creek, and Western Confederacy Indians demonstrates that hunger creation and prevention were tools of diplomacy and warfare available to all people involved in the American Revolution. Placing hunger at the center of these struggles foregrounds the contingency and plurality of power in the British Atlantic during the Revolutionary Era. Thanks to generous funding from Cardiff University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Zero Hunger
Author: Aaron Ansell
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469613980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
When Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil's Workers' Party soared to power in 2003, he promised to end hunger in the nation. In a vivid ethnography with an innovative approach to Brazilian politics, Aaron Ansell assesses President Lula's flagship antipoverty program, Zero Hunger (Fome Zero), focusing on its rollout among agricultural workers in the poor northeastern state of Piaui. Linking the administration's fight against poverty to a more subtle effort to change the region's political culture, Ansell rethinks the nature of patronage and provides a novel perspective on the state under Workers' Party rule. Aiming to strengthen democratic processes, frontline officials attempted to dismantle the long-standing patron-client relationships--Ansell identifies them as "intimate hierarchies--that bound poor people to local elites. Illuminating the symbolic techniques by which officials attempted to influence Zero Hunger beneficiaries' attitudes toward power, class, history, and ethnic identity, Ansell shows how the assault on patronage increased political awareness but also confused and alienated the program's participants. He suggests that, instead of condemning patronage, policymakers should harness the emotional energy of intimate hierarchies to better facilitate the participation of all citizens in political and economic development.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469613980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
When Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil's Workers' Party soared to power in 2003, he promised to end hunger in the nation. In a vivid ethnography with an innovative approach to Brazilian politics, Aaron Ansell assesses President Lula's flagship antipoverty program, Zero Hunger (Fome Zero), focusing on its rollout among agricultural workers in the poor northeastern state of Piaui. Linking the administration's fight against poverty to a more subtle effort to change the region's political culture, Ansell rethinks the nature of patronage and provides a novel perspective on the state under Workers' Party rule. Aiming to strengthen democratic processes, frontline officials attempted to dismantle the long-standing patron-client relationships--Ansell identifies them as "intimate hierarchies--that bound poor people to local elites. Illuminating the symbolic techniques by which officials attempted to influence Zero Hunger beneficiaries' attitudes toward power, class, history, and ethnic identity, Ansell shows how the assault on patronage increased political awareness but also confused and alienated the program's participants. He suggests that, instead of condemning patronage, policymakers should harness the emotional energy of intimate hierarchies to better facilitate the participation of all citizens in political and economic development.
American Hunger
Author: Eli Saslow
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101873892
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 101
Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting In this Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow traveled across the country over the course of a year—from Florida and Texas to Rhode Island and Tennessee—to examine the personal and political implications and repercussions of America's growing food stamp program. Saslow shows us the extraordinary impact the arrival of food stamps has each month on a small town's struggling economy, the difficult choices our representatives face in implementing this $78-billion program affecting millions of Americans, and the challenges American families, senior citizens, and children encounter every day in ensuring they have enough, and sometimes even anything to eat. These unsettling and eye-opening stories make for required reading, providing nuance and understanding to the complex matters of American poverty. An eBook short.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101873892
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 101
Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting In this Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow traveled across the country over the course of a year—from Florida and Texas to Rhode Island and Tennessee—to examine the personal and political implications and repercussions of America's growing food stamp program. Saslow shows us the extraordinary impact the arrival of food stamps has each month on a small town's struggling economy, the difficult choices our representatives face in implementing this $78-billion program affecting millions of Americans, and the challenges American families, senior citizens, and children encounter every day in ensuring they have enough, and sometimes even anything to eat. These unsettling and eye-opening stories make for required reading, providing nuance and understanding to the complex matters of American poverty. An eBook short.
Reality Hunger
Author: David Shields
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307593231
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
A landmark book, “brilliant, thoughtful” (The Atlantic) and “raw and gorgeous” (LA Times), that fast-forwards the discussion of the central artistic issues of our time, from the bestselling author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Who owns ideas? How clear is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Has the velocity of digital culture rendered traditional modes obsolete? Exploring these and related questions, Shields orchestrates a chorus of voices, past and present, to reframe debates about the veracity of memoir and the relevance of the novel. He argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality,” precisely because we experience hardly any, and urgently calls for new forms that embody and convey the fractured nature of contemporary experience.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307593231
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
A landmark book, “brilliant, thoughtful” (The Atlantic) and “raw and gorgeous” (LA Times), that fast-forwards the discussion of the central artistic issues of our time, from the bestselling author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Who owns ideas? How clear is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Has the velocity of digital culture rendered traditional modes obsolete? Exploring these and related questions, Shields orchestrates a chorus of voices, past and present, to reframe debates about the veracity of memoir and the relevance of the novel. He argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality,” precisely because we experience hardly any, and urgently calls for new forms that embody and convey the fractured nature of contemporary experience.
Breadline USA
Author: Sasha Abramsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000161587
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167
Book Description
Twenty-five million Americans—nearly 9 percent of the U.S. population—rely on food pantries. Another 13 million aren’t linked to a food distribution network, and 14 million children are at risk of going hungry on any given day. Moreover, the faltering economy is increasing the number of American families that don’t know where their next meals are coming from. Breadline USA treats this crisis not only as matter of failed policies, but also as a portrait of real human suffering. Investigative reporter Sasha Abramsky focuses attention on the people behind the statistics—the families caught up in circumstances beyond their control. Breadline USA is a vivid reminder of the fate to which many more Americans may be subject without urgent action.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000161587
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167
Book Description
Twenty-five million Americans—nearly 9 percent of the U.S. population—rely on food pantries. Another 13 million aren’t linked to a food distribution network, and 14 million children are at risk of going hungry on any given day. Moreover, the faltering economy is increasing the number of American families that don’t know where their next meals are coming from. Breadline USA treats this crisis not only as matter of failed policies, but also as a portrait of real human suffering. Investigative reporter Sasha Abramsky focuses attention on the people behind the statistics—the families caught up in circumstances beyond their control. Breadline USA is a vivid reminder of the fate to which many more Americans may be subject without urgent action.
Black Boy [Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition]
Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006302859X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 534
Book Description
A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson. 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.” Wright’s once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and Blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he headed north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.” Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate. “To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness,” John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. “Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear.” One of the great American memoirs, Wright’s account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance—a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time.
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006302859X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 534
Book Description
A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson. 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.” Wright’s once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and Blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he headed north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.” Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate. “To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness,” John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. “Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear.” One of the great American memoirs, Wright’s account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance—a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time.