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Black Boy By Richard Wright

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Black Boy By Richard Wright
Marilyn-Deas Penman
5.12.17
Mrs. Helgeson

Richard Nathaniel Wright was a poet, journalist and author. He wrote one of his famous novels Black Boy. He was born on September 4, 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi and lived with his brother, mother and father. Wright was the grandson of slaves and the son of a sharecropper. Richard Wright was raised by his mother, a caring woman who became a single parent ever since her husband left the family. https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/b/black-boy/book-summary Wright was five years old when his father left. African Americans were treated poorly during this period. They were bought and sold as slaves. Wright was an author during World War 1 and the Civil War. At the age of 16, there was a short
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The themes in Black Boy includes racism, movement and dislocation, hunger, illness, Christianity, reading and writing.

How does it portray the American dream? The book portrays the life of freedom and equal rights. His works influenced peoples’ thoughts about how people of color were poorly treated and African American people deserved to have freedom and equal rights. Richard Wright’s book is written in first person. it details his life from age four through his twenties.
He shows poverty, violence, hunger, and ignorance shaped the southern black man. The setting for this book is initially set in the south. Richard was born in 1908 in Mississippi where racism and segregation were firmly entrenched. http://www.litcharts.com/lit/black-boy

He moved often due to his mother’s inability to provide her boys after their father deserted them. The positive criticism for Black Boy is that he can portray what life was like in the 1920s. Richard does a good job of describing his childhood and what it’s like growing up and these difficult times for African Americans. One negative criticism is that from Richard Wright’s point of view and does not portray how all people behaved during this time, as not every single person treated African Americans in this negative way.

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