Harper, not Wright, expunged radical content from Black Boy

Evidence

American Hunger (Harper and Row, New York, 1977) is the title Wright originally suggested (among others) for his unpublished manuscript, “Island of Hallucination.” Fabre, op. cit., p. 616 n. 19. The material published under the former title is in large measure the parts of Black Boy (Harper, New York, 1945), which Harper expunged from its 1945 edition. Darryl Pinckney would appear to be wrong when he suggests in his review of American Hunger that Wright himself was responsible for the deletion (see “Richard Wright: the Unnatural History of a Native Son,” Village Voice, 4 July 1977, p. 80), since Wright had published much of the material in the Atlantic Monthly (August and September 1944) under the title “I Tried to be a Communist.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2467

Categorization

• XREF: Publisher censorship of radical Black writing reinforces the pattern of institutional suppression of the Black radical voice.