Boxed set with early works

Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 - November 28, 1960) was an
author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction.
Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of
African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries suffering discrimination
and violence. Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the
United States in the mid-20th century
This book includes
Wright’s wrenching memoir Black Boy, an eloquent account of his struggle to
escape a life of poverty, ignorance and fear in his native South, was an immediate
bestseller when it appeared in 1945.
But Wright’s complete autobiography, published for the first time in this volume
as Black Boy (American Hunger), is a far more complex and probing work. Its
original second section, in which Wright chronicled his encounter with racism
in the North, his apprenticeship as a writer, and his disillusionment with the
Communist Party, was cut at the insistence of book club editors and was only
published posthumously as a separate work. Now that the two parts of Wright’s
autobiography are finally printed together, Black Boy (American Hunger)
appears as a new and different work—a unique contribution to the literature of
self-discovery and a searing vision of racism in Northern slums as well as
Southern shanties.
Richard Wright’s novel The Outsider (1953) appears here in a text that
restores the many stylistic changes and long cuts made by his editors without
his knowledge. This text, based on Wright’s final, corrected typescript, casts
new light on his development of the style he called “poetic realism.” The “outsider”
of Wright’s story is Cross Damon, a black man who works in the Chicago post office.
When Damon is mistakenly believed to have died in a subway accident, he seizes
the opportunity to invent a new life for himself. In this, his most philosophical novel,
Wright reconsiders the existentialist themes of man’s freedom and responsibility
as he traces Damon’s doomed attempts to lead a free life.

"Black boy (American hunger)", "The outsider"