The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright

Tuesday, June 15, 2021--San Antonio

I became aware of the book The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright because of an NPR story.  It's a unique publishing situation.  The book was written in the early 1940's, but was not published until this year.  The author is a Black man who had two very successful novels published (one before and one after this book) plus other publications.  This book was not published at the time, because the publishing company thought the readers would not be comfortable with the first quarter of it which deals with a young Black man being picked up by 3 policemen as he walks home from his job working for a wealthy family next door to another family where an intruder, unknown to him, has killed the residents that day.  In an attempt to quickly solve the crime, the policemen dismiss everything he tells them and torture him through the night.  Finally, they tell him they can send him home to his pregnant wife if he signs a paper (which he is now too disoriented to read and includes a confession to having committed the murders. 

It was difficult for me to read those pages, just as the original publishers had expected it to be then.  I had to stop and wait for another day to continue.  But I forced myself to go back to it because I wanted to know about the underground life he had lived and how he had managed to escape from the police to live it.  The book has gotten very good reviews, and it was quite interesting.  It includes another short piece that the author wrote that explains his (the author's) background story of having been raised by a stern 7th Day Adventist grandmother and how that affected his writing of this short book.  Overall, I enjoyed the book and I appreciated the added feature that explained so much of it.  I gave the book 3 stars out of 5.