What to Read
<https://www.nytimes.com/section/books?name=styln-books-general®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&variant=1_Show>
* New Books to Watch For in April
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/books/april-2021-books.html?name=styln-books-general®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&variant=1_Show&is_new=false>
* 25 Book Review Greats
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/books/great-book-reviews.html?name=styln-books-general®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&variant=1_Show&is_new=false>
* Listen: The Book Review Podcast
<https://www.nytimes.com/column/book-review-podcast?name=styln-books-general®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&variant=1_Show&is_new=false>
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/books/richard-wright-man-who-lived-underground.html#after-top>
Decades After His Death, Richard Wright Has a New Book Out
“The Man Who Lived Underground,” a novel publishers rejected in the
1940s, is about an innocent Black man forced to confess to the murder of
a white couple.
*
<https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=9869919170&link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F04%2F14%2Fbooks%2Frichard-wright-man-who-lived-underground.html%3Fsmid%3Dfb-share&name=Decades%20After%20His%20Death%2C%20Richard%20Wright%20Has%20a%20New%20Book%20Out&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F>
*
<https://api.whatsapp.com/send?text=Decades%20After%20His%20Death%2C%20Richard%20Wright%20Has%20a%20New%20Book%20Out%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F04%2F14%2Fbooks%2Frichard-wright-man-who-lived-underground.html%3Fsmid%3Dwa-share>
*
<https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F04%2F14%2Fbooks%2Frichard-wright-man-who-lived-underground.html%3Fsmid%3Dtw-share&text=Decades%20After%20His%20Death%2C%20Richard%20Wright%20Has%20a%20New%20Book%20Out>
*
<mailto:?subject=NYTimes.com%3A%20Decades%20After%20His%20Death%2C%20Richard%20Wright%20Has%20a%20New%20Book%20Out&body=From%20The%20New%20York%20Times%3A%0A%0ADecades%20After%20His%20Death%2C%20Richard%20Wright%20Has%20a%20New%20Book%20Out%0A%0A%E2%80%9CThe%20Man%20Who%20Lived%20Underground%2C%E2%80%9D%20a%20novel%20publishers%20rejected%20in%20the%201940s%2C%20is%20about%20an%20innocent%20Black%20man%20forced%20to%20confess%20to%20the%20murder%20of%20a%20white%20couple.%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F04%2F14%2Fbooks%2Frichard-wright-man-who-lived-underground.html%3Fsmid%3Dem-share>
*
*
* /8/
Richard Wright, who died in 1960, is the author of “Native Son” and
“Black Boy.” When he submitted “The Man Who Lived Underground,” he said,
“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer
inspiration.” Below: pages from a draft of “The Man Who Lived Underground.”
Richard Wright, who died in 1960, is the author of “Native Son” and
“Black Boy.” When he submitted “The Man Who Lived Underground,” he said,
“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer
inspiration.” Below: pages from a draft of “The Man Who Lived
Underground.”Credit...Carl Van Vechten and Van Vechten Trust, via the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Noor Qasim
ByNoor Qasim
NYT, April 14, 2021
In 1941, Richard Wright, fresh off the success of his novel “Native
Son,” sent his editor the draft of a new book called “The Man Who Lived
Underground.”
It is the story of Fred Daniels, a Black man who is detained and beaten
by the police, who coerce him into a false confession that he killed a
white couple. He escapes, then flees to the sewer system, where he takes
refuge in a cave and, in a series of allegorical passages, peers into a
church and gains access to businesses and other facilities through their
basements. Daniels eventually returns to the light of day, eager to
share the lessons he learned underground, but is greeted with
indifference and cruelty.
“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer
inspiration,” Wright wrote in defense of his submission, “or executed
any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom, or
expressed myself in a way that flowed more naturally from my own
personal background, reading, experiences and feelings.”
The publisher, Harper & Brothers, turned him down. A portion of the
novel was later released as a short story, but the original manuscript
went unread until 2010, when Wright’s daughter, Julia Wright, unearthed
it from his papers at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/books/richard-wright-man-who-lived-underground.html#after-story-ad-1>
Now Library of America is preparing to release “The Man Who Lived
Underground” in its original form on Tuesday, with an essay by Wright,
“Memories of My Grandmother,” and an afterword by his grandson, Malcolm
Wright. “I’m very excited for this to be in the world,” Julia Wright
said in an interview.
Richard Wrightdied of a heart attack in 1960
<https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0904.html>,
when he was 52. For his daughter, the posthumous release of his book is
particularly poignant in 2021. For years, she lived in Paris, traveling
to the United States to delve into her father’s archive and to visit and
advocate for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the activist and journalist in prison for
the killing of a police officer. With each of her visits, she saw new
evidence of “Black men who were ‘free’ but who were sentenced to death
in the streets,” she said.
GET THE BOOK REVIEW NEWSLETTER:Be the first to see reviews, news and
features in The New York Times Book Review.
Sign Up
When she came across “The Man Who Lived Underground” in its entirety,
Julia Wright said, the idea to publish it “was a no-brainer.”
Editors’ Picks
I Tried to Filter Him Out
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/style/modern-love-muslim-hindu-dating.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=832814025&impression_id=38756c80-9ede-11eb-89c3-f9607380a70c&index=0&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=798540562&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
‘Do I Really Belong Here?’: Korean Americans in the N.B.A. Wonder
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/sports/basketball/nba-korean.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=361936779&impression_id=38756c81-9ede-11eb-89c3-f9607380a70c&index=1&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=798540562&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Books About Racism and Police Violence Fill Out List of ‘Most
Challenged’ Titles
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/books/american-library-association-banned-books.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=640062869&impression_id=38756c82-9ede-11eb-89c3-f9607380a70c&index=2&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=798540562&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/books/richard-wright-man-who-lived-underground.html?action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending#after-pp_edpick>
ImagePages from a draft of “The Man Who Lived Underground.”
Pages from a draft of “The Man Who Lived Underground.”Credit...Richard
Wright Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the American
Literature Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University.
Some readers may be familiar with a short story by the same name, which
begins with Daniels going underground, but they will not have read the
novel’s first section, in which he is arrested without explanation,
kicked, punched, slammed into walls and floors, and hung upside down by
his shackled ankles. “You’re playing a game,” one of the policemen tells
him, “but we’ll break you, even if we have to kill you!” By the time
Daniels is presented with a confession statement, he can’t focus his
vision enough to read it.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/books/richard-wright-man-who-lived-underground.html#after-story-ad-2>
Julia Wright said she believed that the previously unpublished portions
add context to the story of a man’s adventure in the sewers, a realistic
dimension to an otherwise fantastical tale. “We need what’s happened in
the daylight, in the critical daylight, to understand the change that
Fred Daniels goes through in the underground,” she said.
Some of the first readers of Wright’s manuscript were taken aback by the
brutality of those daylight scenes. Kerker Quinn, the editor of the
literary quarterly Accent, called them “unbearable” in the margins of
his copy. After Harper & Brothers rejected the novel, Quinn included two
short excerpts in the magazine in 1942, focusing solely on scenes in
Daniels’s underground cave. In 1944, the story — without the novel’s
first section — was published in the anthology “Cross Section,” and a
similarly truncated version was later included in a collection of
Wright’s short stories, “Eight Men.”
“It’s not by accident that it was not published back in the 1940s,” his
grandson, Malcolm Wright, said in an interview.
Comments like Quinn’s, along with the cuts made to the novel, suggest
that editors and publishers were uncomfortable with the original book’s
subject matter and tone, John Kulka, the editorial director of Library
of America, said in an interview.
While “Native Son” also featured scenes of violence — some of which
Wright cut or revised at the request of the influential
Book-of-the-Month Club — the Black protagonist, Bigger Thomas, had
victims who were both white and Black, and his story seemed to traffic
in the tropes, as James Baldwin argued in “Everybody’s Protest Novel,”
that appealed to white sympathies.
“The Man Who Lived Underground” offered no such appeal. “It’s an
immensely Black book,” said Kiese Laymon, a writer who counts Wright
among his influences and read the Library of America version before its
publication. “There’s no character in this book that white liberals can
be like, ‘Oh, that’s me.’ That’s a hard sell sometimes.”
Image
Library of America is publishing “The Man Who Lived
Underground” this year.
Library of America is publishing “The Man Who Lived Underground” this year.
In the included essay “Memories of My Grandmother,” Wright explained the
genesis of the novel, writing that he was inspired by his Seventh-day
Adventist grandmother, the structure of blues lyrics, the “Invisible
Man” films of the 1930s, the writing of Gertrude Stein and the arrival
of Surrealism in America. Laymon described the book as both a critique
of the justice system and an “internal, Surrealist Black story, from a
Black space told to Black spaces and places and people.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/books/richard-wright-man-who-lived-underground.html#after-story-ad-3>
Wright anticipated a skeptical response. “I know, of course, that to
mention Surrealism in terms of Negro life in America will strike some
people like trying to mix oil and water,” he wrote in the essay. “It
seems that there has grown up in people’s minds a concept of/just/what
the Negro is, and anything that smacks of something which they do not
want to associate with the Negro, for one reason or another, they will
brand as alien.”
Whether this was true of Wright’s publishers, they likely did not,
according to Kulka, believe “The Man Who Lived Underground” was a
“worthy successor” to “Native Son.” “Native Son” sold 215,000 copies
within three weeks of its publication and made Wright “America’s leading
Black author,” Kulka said. Wright’s agent and editor were looking for
“another big fat work of literary naturalism, not a short allegorical
novel about a man who takes up an underground existence in an unnamed
city,” he added.
While Wright himself made the changes to “The Man Who Lived Underground”
— cutting it down to less than half its original length — his
descendants see those revisions as a sort of forced compromise and
believe that it would have otherwise not been published. Julia Wright,
notingsimilarly substantial revisions
<https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/28/books/the-works-of-richard-wright-as-written.html>required
of Wright’s memoir, including its title change from “American Hunger” to
“Black Boy,” described the alterations as “dismemberment.”
Laymon, who rereleased his essay collection “How to Slowly Kill Yourself
and Others in America
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/books/review/how-to-slowly-kill-yourself-and-others-in-america-kiese-laymon.html>”
earlier this year, has also expressed frustration with the publishing
industry and how his work has been treated. He sees hope in and gathers
strength from Wright’s legacy.
“I was never going to compromise, because Wright had to compromise,”
Laymon said. “And I know Wright didn’t want us to.”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#8052): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/8052
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/82149162/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
