The Man Who Lived Underground
Richard Wright
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Man Who Lived Underground
Richard Wright
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... feels wearily descriptive of far too many moments in contemporary America.
A...logical comparison may be with Native Son. Weighing in at under 160 pages, Underground is perhaps less ambitious than Wright’s most famous novel, but it matches that work for sheer tension, and while the narrative propulsion of Native Son comes to a halt near the end, as Bigger’s lawyer mounts his defense, Underground moves continuously forward with its masterful blend of action and reflection, a kind of philosophy on the run. The work is rich with literary echoes.
Wright reached for the very core of the human condition in his portrait of growing up destitute in the Deep South during the early 20th century, and then making his way north: abundance everywhere and terrible hunger, tragedy mixed with the quotidian in the most disorienting ways. The experience he evoked might not have been every Black life, but it was indeed a part of Black life.
To read The Man Who Lived Underground today is to recognize an author who knew his work could be shelved for decades without depreciation. Because this is America. Because police misconduct, to use the genteel 2021 term, is ageless. Check the copyright page, read the production notes: Yes, this was written in 1941. Yes, it’s 80 years later. Yes, Wright died in 1960, at 52, having never scaled again the commercial heights of Native Son. Yet somehow The Man Who Lived Underground found its way into bookstores at the right time.
The tale of the tunnel burglar, as he was also known, gripped the imagination of Richard Wright (no relation), who had long held a fascination with detective stories and pulp fiction, as illustrated by his uneven psychological thriller Savage Holiday. Although the tunnel burglar was white, Wright saw parallels between his subterranean existence and the ways in which African Americans were forced to live out of sight in American society.
The Man Who Lived Underground is constructed of the precise, often terse, sentences that are a hallmark of Wright’s work, and its prose, thrumming with energy, has many pleasures to offer. Its story, in contrast, contains none. Simply put, it’s a work of horror.
It’s a short, riveting, exploratory work.
More than just a curio of African American literary history, Wright’s tale of how one Black man experiences police violence and is plunged into a life-changing existential crisis as a result is, sadly, still as relevant today as it was when Wright wrote it.
The extended depiction of police brutality in the newly restored section makes Wright’s novel particularly urgent.
Wright wrote this mythic, crescendo odyssey, this molten tragedy of tyranny and the destruction of a life, at the start of WWII, 10 years before Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man appeared. But despite the resounding success of Native Son , Wright’s publisher rejected this lacerating tale. Now, finally, this devastating inquiry into oppression and delusion, this timeless tour de force, emerges in full, the work Wright was most passionate about, as he explains in the profoundly illuminating essay, Memories of My Grandmother,” also published here for the first time. This blazing literary meteor should land in every collection..
Wright’s brutal realism still resonates 80 years later.
Wright’s prolific and prophetic use of language shows what happens when the tables are turned and an individual who is stripped of everything but his body can then, as an act of freedom, strip the value from everything else. The added layer of race further subverts the ideals that go along with what society alleges are the right things to desire—Christianity, money, and life. Daniels rejects these desires. While above ground, he anxiously awaited the birth of his child. While underground, Daniels sees a dead Black baby floating in the muck like a discarded doll. He pushes it away because it is too much of a reminder of the problems of Blackness on the surface.
The latest and arguably the greatest of Richard Wright’s striking shadow books, starts off like a story ripped from today’s headlines, although it was written, submitted for publication, and summarily rejected in 1941.
The power and pain of Wright’s writing are evident in this wrenching novel, which was rejected by his publisher in 1942, shortly after the release of Native Son.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright, finally published in full.