Richard Wright (1908-1960) is the author and narrator of Black Boy. Wright was born in Mississippi. His father was a sharecropper, and his mother was a schoolteacher. Wright spent most of his life in the South up until 1927, when he made the trek to Chicago in search of greater freedom outside of the restrictions of the Jim Crow South. In the period covered by Black Boy, roughly 1912 to 1936, Wright recounts a childhood and teenage years marked by a literal and metaphorical hunger. These early experiences make him an ideal writer to document American racism and poverty in the early twentieth century.

In childhood, most of the hallmarks of the adult Richard Wright are already there. Wright is a disruptive, violent presence in his family from the first moment of the narrative, when he sets fire to his grandmother’s house out of curiosity about what the flame might do. In the years after that sensational event, Wright pursues his curiosity about language, people, the natural world, and racial relations, no matter how frequently this curiosity leads to disapproval and violence from the adults in his life.