Here's the Novel Richard Wright Wasn't Allowed to Publish
I had to start Richard Wright’s novel The Man Who Lived Underground three times before I could get past the first 20 pages. On the first couple of tries, I had to put the book down; it was too painful to keep reading—and I’ve got a strong stomach. The third time I just buckled down and plowed through. It still wasn’t easy.
As anyone knows who has read Wright’s memoir Black Boy—that’s the one that opens with a 4-year-old boy accidentally setting fire to his family’s home—no writer understands how to start a story better than Richard Wright. The Man Who Lived Underground proves the point all over again.
Fred Daniels is walking home from work when he’s picked up by the cops, taken to police headquarters, and beaten almost to death, all to extract a false confession that he killed a white couple in their home.
The beating goes on for about 30 pages, but brutal as it is, it is nowhere as horrifying as the placid, bigoted assumption by the police that the first Black man they see in the neighborhood of the killing they’re investigating is their chief suspect. As far as detectives Murphy, Johnson, and Lawson are concerned, Daniels was a convicted murderer the moment they first saw him walk down the sidewalk.
The Man Who Lived Underground is now being published in book form for the first time. Wright wrote the novel in 1941, and parts were published in literary magazines, but his publisher turned it down. I can’t find any explanation for this decision, but if I had to guess I would say it had nothing to do with the quality of the writing, which is superb throughout, and everything to do with its indictment of the horrific segregated world Wright describes. It does not take a terribly cynical mind to think that even well-intentioned white editors in the early 1940s might have found Wright’s vision unbelievable.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/heres-the-novel-richard-wright-wasnt-allowed-to-publishI
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