PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Richard Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908, to a sharecropping family of ex--slaves. His mother was a schoolteacher but, abandoned by her husband, she had to resort to menial jobs to feed her two sons before suffering a series of strokes. During a childhood scarred by hunger, Wright lived in Memphis, Tennessee, then in an orphanage, and with various relatives. He left home at fifteen, returned to Memphis for two years to work, and in 1934 went to Chicago where he was employed at the Post Office before beginning work at the Federal Writers' Project in 1935. He published Uncle Tom's Children in 1938 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year. His other books include Native Son (1940), his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), and The Outsider (1953). After the war, Richard Wright chose expatriation and went to live in Paris with his family, remaining there until his death in 1960.
Moves continuously forward with its masterful blend of action and reflection, a kind of philosophy on the run * Wall Street Journal * This astonishing novel [is at last] available to readers, fulfilling a dream Wright wasn't able to realize in his lifetime * OprahDaily.com * The power and pain of Wright's writing are evident in this wrenching novel. . . . Wright makes the impact of racist policing palpable as the story builds to a gut-punch ending * Publishers Weekly * Finally, this devastating inquiry into oppression and delusion, this timeless tour de force, emerges in full... This blazing literary meteor should land in every collection * Booklist * Resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world. A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright's best-known work * Kirkus *
