Black Boy

Richard Wright’s 1945 memoir of growing up poor and Black in Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and of leaving for Chicago. The recurring subject is hunger in both senses — literal, and for books he was not supposed to have. The most-quoted sequence has the teenage Wright forging a note to borrow library books on a white co-worker’s card, discovering H. L. Mencken, and using a public library he was barred from as the whole of his education. The version published in 1945 was cut to end at the move north; the second half appeared in 1977 as American Hunger and is restored in modern editions.

Why it’s on the list: Assigned in UATX’s “Writing and the English Language” course — read as prose, for the plainness of the sentences, rather than as a document; the syllabus puts it beside O’Connor, Morrison and Wolff.

Where I saw it: The University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list, 65 Texts Our Students Are Reading, published November 13 2025 and saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 65-text curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
• Reading — the wiki’s standing thread on reading as the raw input to thinking; the library-card chapters of this memoir are that argument in its starkest form.
• Literature — part of the canon this list is built around.