The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel by Richard Wright - Gripping Literary Fiction About Injustice & Survival | Perfect for Book Clubs & Social Justice Discussions

when we use the word autodidact, an image should materialize of richard wright, grammar school graduate, who never attended a day of highschool in his life, who became an existential novelist, an existentialism based on the french existentialism of sartre and camus, unlike how the talking heads have taught us to use the word existential. wright’s intelligence and ideas has always upset his betters of the day, black and white, read American Hunger, his companion piece to Black Boy. most disturbing to them was his authoritative voice.someone saw the wisdom in pairing wright’s never until now published revealing essay Memories of my Grandmother with this novel. The story of the Man Who Lived Underground is an era piece crime story with social permutations of racial injustice, a black man wrongly accused of a crime is harassed by the police, escapes and takes to the sewers. the setting lends itself not only to noir, but to great literary works like hugo’s Les Misérables and writings by dostoievski. in wright’s hands, the surrealist plot goes deeper into the world of world literature, many of his references readers will have to bring to the surface.in his essay, wright spoke of some of his literary references and shared how memories of his grandmother and her religious beliefs shaped his story. the essay, clearly within the tradition of the prefaces to henry james’ novels and short stories and george bernard shaw’s plays, shows the ideas the author had about literature and used them in his own work. as unavoidable as the references to world literature are in wright’s book, except for french surrealism, he limited his examples to american literary influences in his essay, making clear to his critics, he was an author of american literature.in an afterword to the book, malcolm wright, grandson of richard wright, expounds on racism and police brutality against blacks in his grandfather’s work, finding similarities to highly publicized moments of police killings of blacks in the early part of the 21st century.