Based on a scene from Wright's autobiography, Black boy, in which the seventeen-year-old African-American borrows a white man's library card and devours every book as a ticket to freedom.

Richard Wright and James Baldwin were drawn together as satellites of an American literary world contracted by prejudice. But besides differences of heritage and age—one a son of Mississippi, then ...

"In Native Son, Wright began with the ideological proposition that what whites think of the Negro's reality is more important than what Negroes themselves know it to be," Ralph Ellison wrote in his ...