Full DOWNLOAD Richard Wright: The Library of America Unexpurgated Edition: Native Son /

dignity in a country that denied his humanity. Wright's
masterpiece, Native Son, exploded on the American literary
scene in 1940. The story of Bigger Thomas, a young black
man living in the raw, noisy, crowded slums of Chicago's South
Side, captured the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of
black Americans with an unprecedented intensity and
vividness. The text printed in this volume restores the changes
and cuts--including the replacement of an entire scene--that
Wright was forced to make by book club editors who feared
offending their readers. Wright's wrenching memoir Black Boy,
an eloquent account of his struggle to escape a life of poverty,
ignorance and fear in his native South, was an immediate
bestseller when it appeared in 1945. But Wright's complete
autobiography, published for the first time in this volume as
Black Boy (American Hunger), is a far more complex and
probing work, chronicaling his encounter with racism in the
North, his apprenticeship as a writer, and his disillusionment
with the Communist Party. Wright's 1953 novel The Outsider
appears here in a text that restores the many stylistic changes
and long cuts made by his editors without his knowledge.
When Cross Damon is mistakenly believed to have died in a
subway accident, he seizes the opportunity to invent a new life
for himself. The text here, based on Wright's final, corrected
typescript, casts new light on his development of the style he
called poetic realism.Boxed set containsRichard Wright:Early
Works, 936 pp., andRichard Wright:Later Works, 887 pp.,
volumes #55 and #56 in the Library of America series.