The Man Who Lived Underground

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel from the 1940s by the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy.

Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes—or is permitted to escape—from the precinct and takes up residence in the sewers below the streets of Chicago.

This is the simple, horrible premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, a masterpiece written in the same period as his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) show more that he was unable to publish in his lifetime. Only small parts of it have appeared in print, and in a significantly redacted form it would eventually be included in the short story collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, by special arrangement with the author’s estate, the full text of the work that meant more to Wright than any other (“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration”) is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories of My Grandmother.” Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, contributes an afterword.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Richard Wright was one of the twentieth century's crop of Great American Storytellers, a writer whose entire life of creation was a gift to a country that did not deserve his passionate voice calling into the face of its indifference that we can be better, do better, and must in order to survive.

People my age were required to read Native Son in high school English, and I am so very glad we were. I wouldn't have picked up the book any other way. It needed to be shoved on me. And wonder of wonders, the Austin (Texas) Independent School District of the early 1970s did. It was a tough thing to let myself believe, that people simply but sincerely hated for no better reason than someone was a different skin color than they were. I assumed all those yahoos were just performing their snotty, hateful idiocy like they did their fake homophobia; it seemed to me that racism against Black and Hispanic students was the same. Anything to look cool, after all, and these were teenagers whose ideas of Cool were neither self-reflective nor rebellious enough to have progressed from the 1950s their own parents were stuck in.

Then we read the equally astounding true-crime (I call racism a crime and am not likely to stop doing so) Black Like Me, an account of a white man passing as Black in the Jim Crow South. It too was gut-wrenching, but was different in kind than the novel Native Son. A factual report...well, I am quite sure that my own racism got hard, hard knocks that year. (I am fully aware that I'm complicit in racist society, that in no way am I "not a racist" just because I support Black political candidates and so on.) It's a pity we couldn't have read this jaw-dropping, intense, visceral evocation of the Other as refiner and perfecter of his Othering. It is the apotheosis of Otherness and Othering that this intense story tells its readers.

Anyone who's paid me any attention knows that I can be run off from continuing a read by child abuse, by use of the n-word, by cruelty to animals...the list goes on...and not a few unfriendlies are smirking in anticipation of taxing me with this book's abusive, rage-filled, n-word-bombing ethos...how can I give this five stars and still abandon ship with content warnings in other, arguably less offensive cases? Because Richard Wright never does a single thing to make the awfulness of PoV character Fred Daniels's world sensational. The author isn't kidding around, bedizening a story with nastiness to provoke a response. He is telling a story about how Othering a man will, over time, after many small and large blows and much deliberate infliction of every kind of pain, turn him in to the thing that he was not, did not want to be, and could not bear to know that he now was.

It worked, in its honesty and its clarity of purpose. I left the sewer Fred lived in without regret, without revulsion, and with the most horrified, profound acceptance of Fred as he was abused and neglected into being. Acceptance of his re-creation, transformation.

In the inexcusably hate-filled twenty-first century, we are fighting the battle that Fred lost all over again. There are wins...the conviction of Ahmaud Arbery's murderers...there are defeats, the gerrymandering cases standing out to me as disasters to Black people...but the trend is towards, as it ever was, the endless and pointless perpetuation of hate based on stupidity among the haters and truculence among the hated.

Books like this are strong medicine against both ends of the spectrum. Fred, a victim, sees what the System does to people, and ultimately still surrenders to it. Not to fight against the dehumanizing and brutalizing actions and inactions of the system that allows Fred to exist in the literal sewers is to acquiesce in the process of creating more Freds...and that is a moral wrong and a societal tragedy. Author Wright doesn't allow his readers the luxury of redemption. This book remained unpublished for seventy years because it is the most hopeless document of degradation's triumph I've ever read. White people of the 1940s would've been offended by the clear-eyed assertion of police violence as it happened...nowadays that illusion is gone...but they wouldn't have wanted to read about a good man surrendering his humanity regardless of that knee-jerk response. The accusing fingers pointing back at them as they called out Author Wright for his bleak treatment of Fred (theirs was the system he succumbed to, after all) were simply too on-the-nose.

There is an extended essay included with the novel entitled “Memories of My Grandmother” that enables our appalled eyes to see where so much of the story we've just read originated. The fact that Christian religion played such a big role in Wright's formation into a man capable of the kind of wordsmithing he does isn't a big surprise. I'm very grateful that the author's daughter required the essay to be published within the book containing the novel...it's a long piece and, even if you're on the fence about reading the novel, I hope you'll consider procuring it to read the essay alone. It is a marvelous explication of how each generation forms the next, for good and ill.

What Author Wright isn't, in the writing of this story, is subtle. The metaphors defining it simply aren't debatable: Whites own the sunshine and consign the Blacks to the literal sewers to eke out whatever existences they can. A Black man who's innocent of any crime is shoved into the sewer with the rest of the leavings because he's never had a place in the sunshine that was truly his. As he copes increasingly poorly with the sewers, he's not allowed to leave them; he's run away from the white police, deprived them of their fun of torturing and eventually killing him, so they say "stay there and die."

The author doesn't, then, offer Redemption to either side. It's a very uncharitable and un-Christian thing to withhold. But he's got a reason, does Author Wright: "Chickens come home to roost, don’t they?" his daughter quotes him as saying.

They very much do. The perch they roost on is, in this rare and exquisitely painful read, your complicit soul. show less

In the 1940s, Richard Wright published two seminal works (Black Boy and Native Son). Both dealt with the topic of race in America. Wright also wrote another full-length work (this one), but it was rejected by publishers for being too controversial about race. However, during the recent Black Lives Matter movement, many saw the censorship of this book as being a historical injustice that needed correction. So in 2021, this story was published for the world to read… and oh, am I grateful for reading it.

Wright tells the story of a black man who is suddenly accused of double murder. In truth, he was peacefully working for a next-door neighbor during the crime, was active in his church, has a pregnant wife, and lives a morally upstanding show more life. He is arrested and forced into signing a confession by brutal police tactics and a corrupt district attorney. However, he escapes custody and eludes recapture by going down a sewer line. Underground, he develops a life of his own where he sees the world as it actually is. Three days later, he returns to the world to find that it has changed and it is all-too-much the same.

The philosophical depth of this storyline is evident. It reminds me of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, only retold in a modern context. Further, this book is extraordinarily timely, some 70-80 years after its inscription. Sadly, some in the police can still maintain a white-supremacist status quo. Also sadly, it took George Floyd’s death to awaken us that Wright was indeed onto something real in American culture. Yes, this book is not hyperbole but a work of realistic fiction. Like other works of conscience, it speaks to reality more clearly than reading newspapers or Internet websites.

This book obviously touched a sensitive nerve when originally proposed. It obviously can touch a nerve today, too. But that nerve deserves to be touched again and again until we train our society to respond appropriately. I’m glad that this work has been trumpeted recently by so many in the literary industry. Its place in the American literary canon should be found and preserved. This book is ideal and suitable for college campuses where open discussion of these issues can take place. It also needs to become fodder for anyone interested in serious discussion about race in America, including book clubs. In his era, Wright saw his society clearer than society was willing to let him. The question now becomes transformed: Will we let Wright’s message speak to us today, and will we do something about it? show less

note: the following review, and the above stars, are for the title story only, not the three other items added into this volume -

“He had triumphed over the world aboveground. He was free!”

A black man is accused of killing two people, and the white police officers beat him until he signs a confession he never gave. He is able to escape into the sewers below the city, and while underneath has a series of adventures that seem to change him fundamentally. He is not the same when he resurfaces, but the world around him is.

I think this is an amazing story, which says a lot about the condition of the black man in the 1940's, which is to say, is not much different than it is now. When life in a sewer line is an upgrade, that says a lot show more about the life that one is forced to lead. The repugnant, torturous behavior of the white police officers has been echoed over and over in the eight decades since this was written, and the fictional character of Fred Daniels in this book can easily be compared to the real-life victims of police violence now. Richard Wright knew the truth all too well, and this book is still calling us out in 2023. An important read. show less

The opening pages of this book by one of America’s greatest writers were a shock both to Richard Wright’s agent and publisher. They were so violent and painful to read that the book could not be published when first written in the early 1940s. It has taken some 80 years before the full text can finally appear. And what was the shocking bit? The book opens with the arrest of a Black man accused of a murder he did not commit, and the brutal beatings and abuse he suffers at the hands of white policemen. No wonder the book is being hailed as relevant to our time.

But anyone expecting a realistic story will be disappointed, because Wright has ambitions far beyond telling a story of racial injustice, which he had done before so show more successfully. As he explains in a long essay at the end of the book, this novella is an attempt to get inside the head of the author’s grandmother who raised him. A deeply religious woman, she lived in a world of her own making as does the main character in this book when he literally goes underground.

An unusual book, painful to read in parts, but intelligent and gripping as well. show less

56. The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright
afterward Malcolm Wright (2021)
OPD: 2021 (written 1941-1942, with a shortened version published in 1944)
format: 228-page Kindle ebook
acquired: October 3 read: Oct 4-15 time reading: 5:44, 1.5 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Novel theme: Richard Wright
locations: unknown American city, probably southern
about the author: American author born on a Mississippi plantation, 1908-1960

This for me was a curiosity, part powerful, part quirky. Wright takes a close look at police brutality against African Americans (a point noted in his publisher's rejection documentation) and then an almost surreal look at a refugee living in American sewers. Fred Daniels, a good church-going upstanding person and show more expectant father, is arrested for a murder he knows nothing about. He's not questioned, but beat-up by an all-white police force demanding a confession. It's not clear where his mind was before this happens, but he gets rattled, and it seems his mind is never able to settle down. Instead, in the sewers he tunnels, and he stumbles across apparent odd truths about the basics in life - religion, death, money, entertainment, etc.

Maybe think Plato's cave. It's a combination of Wright's creativity and what I see has his semi-super-aware, semi-blind romantic mindset. It makes an odd combination of strange guy in a strange place doing strange things that don't quite make sense. In a long afterward, which Wright intended to be published with the novel, he explained the novel as a response to the stubborn illogical religious faith his grandmother followed and depended on, a source of conflict between he and his grandmother, his main parent during his older childhood.

This is a lost novel. Wright wrote it written during WW2, in 1942, but it was rejected for publication by his publisher. A shorter version was published in a journal, and later in a posthumous collection. Wright moved on, composing [Black Boy], his classic published in 1945. There he goes directly into his grandmother's religion and state of mind, and its impacts on him. The full version of this novel was first published in 2021, after Wright's grandson, Malcolm Wright, pushed for it.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/354226#8263418 show less

Underground Son
Review of the Library of America hardcover edition (Unpublished manuscript from 1941/42, first published April, 2021)

I read Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy (1945/2020) in its 75th Anniversary expanded edition only earlier this year, thanks to a subscription to Shakespeare & Co.'s Year of Reading Lost Treasures. It was interesting to read there in the biographical timeline information about the lost, unfinished and/or unpublished early Wright works such as the first published story The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre (1923) [no copies have been found of the newspaper where it was first printed], the unfinished early novels Little Sister (1939) & Black Hope (1941) and the early rejected novels such as Cesspool (1935) show more [later published as Lawd Today! (1963)], Tarbaby's Dawn (1937, still unpublished) and The Man Who Lived Underground (1941-42). As fate would have it, the latter has now been published in 2021.

The plot is easily summarized. A Black-American handyman, Fred Daniels is arrested on suspicion of committing murders in a house nearby to where he works. He is brought to the police station and brutally beaten and interrogated until he signs a confession. Through a chance trip allowed by the police to visit his wife in the hospital (who is giving birth), Daniels manages to escape and hides down a manhole in the sewers. He lives underground for several days digging passages into basements and secretly observing events in various businesses. Having an eventual revelation he emerges from underground and turns himself back into the police in order to reveal what he knows but it all ends with fatal consequences. Meanwhile, the criminal behind the original murders had been caught and the police know that Daniels was in fact innocent.

This newly published 2021 edition includes the essay Memories of my Grandmother which provides an extremely thorough background to the themes which are either overt or hidden in The Man Who Lived Underground. At first you can't even imagine how Wright's grandmother's religious faith would even relate to the novel, but Wright explains it with a great amount of detail. Even the fantastical story about someone living underground was based on a real-life incident in Hollywood, California that Wright read about in a True Detective magazine. The religious parallel to an innocent man condemned for crimes he didn't commit and who later 'rises' was the main metaphor that I drew from the story, but Wright's essay explains so much more about his grandmother's view of the world which was not 'real' to everyone else.

80 years later, this story still has the power to shock and disturb. The Library of America has filled a significant publishing gap in Wright's works by finally producing this excellent edition which includes Afterwords by Wright's daughter and grandson.

Trivia and Links
‘It couldn’t be more relevant’: the unseen Richard Wright novel finally getting its due by David Smith for The Guardian April 22, 2021. show less

African American Fred Daniels has just finished his job in a white neighbourhood when he is stopped by the police and accused of a horrendous double murder which occurred right next door. Daniels is aware of the odds of a Black man being found ‘not guilty’ by an all-white jury or, for that matter, living long enough to make it to trial so he finally claims guilt after being tortured. When the cops take him to visit his wife in the hospital after she gives birth to their child, not out of compassion but to make him suffer even more, he takes the opportunity to escape. He disappears into the sewer system from which he begins a new life underground.

The Man Who Lived Underground was written by Richard Wright in the ‘40s but was show more reduced to a short story by his publishers who refused to publish it in this, it’s original form. This is not an easy read or at least not for me. The two word that seemed best to sum up my reaction to it were shocking and disturbing perhaps in most part because, despite its age, this story still very much relevant to today. A brilliant and important addition to Richard Wright’s lexicon.

Thanks to Netgalley and Library of America for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review show less