[In the following excerpt, Adams offers his interpretation of Wright's Black Boy, arguing that its historical inaccuracies have deliberate, metaphorical purpose.]

Like the autobiographies of Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright's Black Boy, published in 1945, has confused readers because of its generic ambiguity. For many readers, the book is particularly honest, sincere, open, convincing, and accurate. But for others, Black Boy leaves a feeling of inauthenticity, a sense that the story or its author is not to be trusted. These conflicting reactions are best illustrated by the following representative observations by Ralph K. White and W. E. B. Du Bois. White, a psychologist, has identified [in “Black Boy”] “ruthless honesty” as “ the outstanding quality which made the book not only moving but also intellectually satisfying.” But Du Bois notes [in “Richard Wright Looks Back”] that although “nothing that Richard Wright says is in itself unbelievable or impossible; it is the total picture that is not convincing.” Attempting to reconcile these opposing views, I wish to argue that both sides are correct; that the book is an especially truthful account of the black experience in America, even though the protagonist's story often does not ring true; and that this inability to tell the truth is Wright's major metaphor of self. A repeated pattern of misrepresentation becomes the author's way of making us believe that his personality, his family, his race—his whole childhood and youth— conspired to prevent him from hearing the truth, speaking the truth, or even being believed unless he lied.

For most readers, worries about Black Boy's trustworthiness stem from questions of genre. Although the book was clearly not called “The Autobiography of Richard Wright,” its subtitle—“A Record of Childhood and Youth”—does suggest autobiography with some claim to documentary accuracy. The following descriptions of Black Boy reflect the confusion of readers: biography, autobiographical story, fictionalized biography, masterpiece of romanced facts, sort of autobiography, pseudoautobiography, part-fiction/part-truth autobiography, autobiography with the quality of fiction, and case history....

Although Wright seemed unsure of his book's generic identity, he never referred to Black Boy as autobiography. His original title, American Hunger, later used for the portion of his life story that began after leaving Memphis for Chicago, came after he had rejected The Empty Box, Days of Famine, The Empty Houses, The Assassin, Bread and Water, and Black Confession, all of which sound like titles for novels. When his literary agent suggested the subtitle “The Biography of a Courageous Negro,” Wright responded with “The Biography of an American Negro,” then with eight other possibilities including “Coming of Age in the Black South,” “A Record in Anguish,” “A Study in Anguish,” and “A Chronicle of Anxiety.” Such titles indicate his feeling that the book he had written was less personal, more documentary—a study, a record, a chronicle, or even a biography—than autobiography. Constance Webb reports [in Richard Wright] that Wright was uneasy with the word autobiography, both because of “an inner distaste for revealing in first person instead of...