Hunger for Connection: Being Known by Finding Your Voice

Fighting with Words: Reviewing Richard Wright’s Classic Memoir, ‘Black Boy (American Hunger)’

A nineteen-year-old Richard Wright thumbed a copy of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, landing on an editorial denouncing the famous—or infamous—newspaperman and critic H.L. Mencken as a fool.

“I felt a vague sympathy for him,” said Wright. The only people denounced in southern newspapers, as far as Wright knew, were people who looked like him: black. But …