"理查德?赖特影响深远的回忆录《黑孩子》75周年纪念特别版,增加了非裔美国作家约翰?埃德加?韦德曼撰写的新前言和作者的孙子马尔科姆?赖特的后记。 《黑孩子》首次出版时在美国引起激烈的讨论,《纽约时报》的奥维尔?普雷斯科特曾评价此书“如果有足够多的人写出这样的书,如果有足够多的人阅读它们,也许在某一天,当时机成熟时,会有更多的理解和更真实的民主。”而这本书也曾因为过分残酷的内容而被禁止进入学校。 这本曾经饱受争议,现在却备受赞誉的自传描述了南方种族歧视的残酷性,以及作为一个黑人男孩为了生存所需要的绝望意志。 赖特在密西西比州的森林里长大,忍受着贫穷、饥饿、恐惧、虐待和仇恨。 他渴望一种不同的生活方式,于是一路向北,终抵达芝加哥,在那里开始了他的作家生涯。 在《黑孩子》的结尾,赖特手持铅笔泰然自若地坐着,决心“把文字投入这片黑暗,等待回音”。 75年过去了,他的话仍然回荡在人们心中。 约翰?埃德加?韦德曼在前言中写道: “读《黑孩子》就是凝视黑暗的心灵。” 作为美国伟大的回忆录之一,赖特记录了他的忍耐、心酸和奋斗,也记录了他所处的那个时代。 A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson.When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.”Wright’s once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he may his way north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.” Seventy-five year later, his words continue to reverberate. “To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness,” John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. “Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear.” One of the great American memoirs, Wright’s account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance—a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time.