Restored Richard Wright novel hits bestseller lists
More than 60 years after his death, Richard Wright is again a bestselling author and very much in line with the present.
“The Man Who Lived Underground,” a short novel written in the 1940s and never published in full until this spring, is the surreal but credible story of a Black man who is tortured by police into confessing to a double murder he didn’t commit. He escapes into the city’s sewer system. Like an inversion of the American road novel or a tale of space travel, Fred Daniels inhabits a world outside the world, making up the rules as he goes along and seeing his old life in a new way.
Released by the Library of America, an unofficial canon of the country’s literature, “The Man Who Lived Underground” also includes the Wright essay “Memories of My Grandmother” and an afterword from his grandson, the writer-filmmaker Malcolm Wright.