[(essay date 1993) In the following essay, Porter suggests that Black Boy and American Hunger should be read in order, viewing the two autobiographies as a portrait of the artist.]

As the curtain falls on the final page of American Hunger, the continuation of Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, he is alone in his "narrow room, watching the sun sink slowly in the chilly May sky." Having just been attacked by former Communist associates as he attempted to march in the May Day parade, he ruminates about his life. He concludes that all he has after living in both Mississippi and Chicago, are "words and a dim knowledge that my country has shown me no examples of how to live a human life." Wright ends his autobiography with the following words:

... I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if no echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.¹

American Hunger (1977) is the continuation of Black Boy (1945). Wright initially composed them as one book entitled The Horror and the Glory. Thus, a reading of the two volumes as one continuous autobiography is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of his portrayal of himself as a young writer. Wright achieves remarkable poetic closure by bringing together at the end of American Hunger several interrelated themes which he elaborately spells out in Black Boy. The passage cited above illustrates his concern for words, his intense and troubling solitude, and his yearning to effect a revolution in the collective consciousness of America through the act of writing. In a sentence, the end of American Hunger is essentially the denouement of Black Boy.

Although critics have discussed the effect of Wright's early life on his writings, none has shown systematically how Black Boy (and to a lesser degree American Hunger) can be read primarily as a portrait of the artist as a young man. Consequently, I intend to demonstrate how the theme of words (with their transforming and redeeming power) is the nucleus around which ancillary themes swirl. Wright's incredible struggle to master words is inextricably bound to his defiant quest for individual existence and expression. To be sure, the fundamental nature of the experience is not peculiar to Wright. Many, if not most writers, are marked by their experience with words during childhood. It is no accident that, say, [Jean-Paul] Sartre, a writer whom Wright eventually meets and admires, entitles his autobiography Les Mots. What one sees in Wright's autobiographies is how the behavior of his fanatically religious grandmother, the painful legacy of his father, the chronic suffering of his mother, and how his interactions...