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In his autobiography Black Boy (1945), Richard Wright describes the desperate hunger for books which characterized his boyhood and the diverse subterfuges he devised in order to satisfy it. A century earlier, Frederick Douglass, as if anticipating Wright in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), had revealed that a black boy, in a racist society, would have to resort to duplicitous means if he yearned to read. Reading proved liberating for both the young Douglass and the young Wright, since it provided concepts and narratives which confirmed and illuminated their experiences. As a consequence, they became insatiable readers, and as biographers and literary critics have often shown, they later relied on their reading to convey to their own readers the distinction and signification of their writing. Thus, critics demonstrate that Douglass's Narrative depends for its success in part on the rhetoric and structure of such works as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Emerson's "SelfReliance"I; and from the moment of Native Son's publication in 1940, it was evaluated in relation to other novels-Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in Henry Seidel Canby's promotion of the novel for the Book-of-the-Month Club and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's introduction to the first edition.2
Wright's biographers Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre discuss in detail the numbers of writers he absorbed in the years of his literary apprenticeship. Starting with Mencken in Memphis, he went on to read Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Joseph Conrad, and Charles Dickens; moving to Chicago, he added, among others, Jack London, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Crane, Maxim Gorky, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joseph Wood Krutch, Henry James, Aldous Wood Huxley, and the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. As Kinnamon points out, Wright persisted as well in reading philosophical, political, and sociological materials (Emergence 44, 46, 70). Fabre notes that Wright was a reader of all genres-"magazines, Westerns, literary and progressive political journals, novels,. . . essays by Stalin and theoretical works on Marxism" (Unfinished 170). In the last stages of composing Native Son in New York in 1939, according to Fabre, Wright was reading Dostoyevksy's The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, Ernest Hemingway's short stories, Andre Malraux's Man's Hope, and Leo...