Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Richard Wright's Black Boy. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
Black Boy: Introduction
Black Boy: Plot Summary
Black Boy: Detailed Summary & Analysis
Black Boy: Themes
Black Boy: Quotes
Black Boy: Characters
Black Boy: Symbols
Black Boy: Theme Wheel
Brief Biography of Richard Wright
Historical Context of Black Boy
Other Books Related to Black Boy
- Full Title: Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth
- When Written: 1943
- Where Written: New York City
- When Published: 1945
- Literary Period: 20th-century African-American novel, American memoir
- Genre: Memoir, coming-of-age story
- Setting: Primarily Jackson, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee, from 1908 till the 1920s; then Chicago, IL
- Climax: Richard finally decides to leave Memphis and start a new life in Chicago
- Antagonist: Granny; Pease and Reynolds
- Point of View: First-person
Extra Credit for Black Boy
“Bildungsroman.” Although Black Boy is a memoir, it could also be classified as a “coming of age” story. The German term for this type of narrative is “Bildungsroman,” or, literally, a “novel of education.” In Black Boy, especially, Richard’s personal education in the classics of world literature helps spur his journey to the North. (See, among other publications, the scholarly work Ten is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman, by Geta LeSeur.)
Job. The epigram in some editions of the novel reads: “They meet with darkness in the daytime / and they grope at noonday as in the night.” This is taken from the Book of Job, a notable book of the Hebrew Bible in which the main character suffers a series of trials and losses at the hands of God to determine if he is a worthy person and a true believer in divine power.