Black Boy

Why it’s on the list: Richard Wright’s 1945 memoir of growing up poor and Black in Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee and leaving for Chicago, whose recurring subject is hunger in both senses — literal, and for books he was not supposed to have. Its most-quoted sequence has the teenage Wright forging a note to borrow library books on a white co-worker’s card and discovering H. L. Mencken.

Where I heard about it

• University of Austin — assigned in Writing and the English Language on its Fall 2025 reading list (November 2025), read as prose for the plainness of its sentences, beside O’Connor, Morrison and Wolff. Full curriculum: UATX Fall Reading List.

About this edition

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.

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.