... feels wearily descriptive of far too many moments in contemporary America ... More than any other Black writer, Richard Wright recognized that understanding Black folks’ relationship to the police is central to understanding racism ... The underground strips the markers of his identity just as any prison sentence does. And so, while the book is no longer concerned with the police and arrests and beatdowns, Wright forces readers to ask what the cost of this freedom is ... shows us that even when we survive those interactions, ducking the immediate dangers of incarceration or death, we can find ourselves bewilderingly stuck reliving the moment, struggling to find our freedom.
A...logical comparison may be with Native Son. Weighing in at under 160 pages, Underground is perhaps less ambitious than Wright’s most famous novel, but it matches that work for sheer tension, and while the narrative propulsion of Native Son comes to a halt near the end, as Bigger’s lawyer mounts his defense, Underground moves continuously forward with its masterful blend of action and reflection, a kind of philosophy on the run. The work is rich with literary echoes ... Whether or not The Man Who Lived Underground is Wright’s single finest work, it must be counted among his most significant.
Wright reached for the very core of the human condition in his portrait of growing up destitute in the Deep South during the early 20th century, and then making his way north: abundance everywhere and terrible hunger, tragedy mixed with the quotidian in the most disorienting ways. The experience he evoked might not have been every Black life, but it was indeed a part of Black life ... Now that I’ve read The Man Who Lived Underground—a previously unpublished novel held in the Wright archives, also written in the early 1940s—I’m even more convinced that Wright deserves to be looked at with fresh eyes ... Wright scripts a surreal reencounter with the world as seen through discovered cracks and doors that reveal hidden interiors ... This isn’t the doctrinal Wright, warning us of the disasters that capitalism creates. This is an unmooring Wright, pushing us past the edge of social analysis and into madness ... the novel is also a Protestant work, as much about God as it is about Black people ... In Fred’s odyssey, which leads him back aboveground to confess to the crime he didn’t commit, Wright has him careen from rage at the pervasive burden of guilt to an embrace of it ... Wright deserves sensitive reconsideration, especially now that so many of us have been proved naive in our belief that an honest rendering of Black people might lead to recognition of our existence in the universality of humanity ... Wright tells an old story that still lives ... He finds himself encountering the world, unfiltered by established terms of order, and acquires a tenderness for all people. In the end, his Black existence presents a particular window and a universal predicament—and a reminder: Surrounded by ghastly forces every day, we destroy life with our many idolatries and illusions.
To read The Man Who Lived Underground today is to recognize an author who knew his work could be shelved for decades without depreciation. Because this is America. Because police misconduct, to use the genteel 2021 term, is ageless. Check the copyright page, read the production notes: Yes, this was written in 1941. Yes, it’s 80 years later. Yes, Wright died in 1960, at 52, having never scaled again the commercial heights of Native Son. Yet somehow The Man Who Lived Underground found its way into bookstores at the right time ... To be fair, The Man Who Lived Underground, complete, does read like two different books — one brutal, one ethereal. But without the violence that sends him fleeing, Fred Daniels’ descent into the underground would be vague ... a true lost gem, with echoes of Camus, Dostoyevsky, Poe.
The tale of the tunnel burglar, as he was also known, gripped the imagination of Richard Wright (no relation), who had long held a fascination with detective stories and pulp fiction, as illustrated by his uneven psychological thriller Savage Holiday. Although the tunnel burglar was white, Wright saw parallels between his subterranean existence and the ways in which African Americans were forced to live out of sight in American society ... The claim that Wright’s story succeeded in terms of narrative, rather than on 'suspected implications', underscores the ways in which his reputation as a novelist waned as literary theory changed direction ... Recent critical opinion has been less kind to Wright than to Baldwin, whose work has enjoyed a startling renaissance, or to Ellison, whose reputation as a nuanced, jazz-inflected stylist is unsurpassed. Wright’s work is depicted – at times unjustly – as one-dimensional, even tone-deaf, lacking the elegance and panache of those younger writers ... Too often in the book, the author’s views – seen here at the stage of a first date in his passionate dalliance with existentialism – are proclaimed. These are moments in which the reader hears Wright, rather than the internal conflict of his protagonist ... Despite these authorial intrusions, the novel is well paced ... an absorbing story told through discordant narrative styles ... Wright, who is capable of subtlety, doesn’t trust nuance to do the work ... Wright achieved a lyrical clarity that his fiction could not always sustain; it was a reminder that his fractured genius could proclaim softly.
The Man Who Lived Underground is constructed of the precise, often terse, sentences that are a hallmark of Wright’s work, and its prose, thrumming with energy, has many pleasures to offer. Its story, in contrast, contains none. Simply put, it’s a work of horror ... Wright explains the character’s genesis and his purpose in creating him. The novel, he says, was written as an exploration of his grandmother’s religious convictions ... Wright thought of Bolden as maddening and inscrutable. But in The Man Who Lived Underground , though he remains sober about the limits of faith, he finds meaning in her desire to set herself apart from society. In his telling, Daniels is hapless but content before his arrest, then freer when he descends into the sewers and forsakes his faith but also adrift and lonesome.
It’s a short, riveting, exploratory work ... The Man Who Lived Underground seems startlingly contemporary in its treatment of police violence against an innocent black man ... the book is much less of a protest novel than Native Son, and takes even greater liberties with naturalism. Its setting and atmosphere—chases through sewers, frenzied manhunts—recall noirish films like Fritz Lang’s M and Carol Reed’s The Third Man. The writing combines the blunt rhythms of hard-boiled detective fiction with kinetic, almost phantasmagorical strokes, intensities of emotion and colour ... Rather than hardening his sense of individual identity, racist persecution leads [the protagonist] to an almost cosmic awareness of what he shares with others.
More than just a curio of African American literary history, Wright’s tale of how one Black man experiences police violence and is plunged into a life-changing existential crisis as a result is, sadly, still as relevant today as it was when Wright wrote it ... The surrealist, fantastical, and gothic elements of both his story and The Man Who Lived Underground serve to underscore how bizarre and unnatural such a governmental structure should seem. The publication of Wright’s long-lost novel, one hopes, will remind us that there are other ways of seeing the state and the market and, ultimately, other ways of governing ourselves and supplying the necessities of life.
The extended depiction of police brutality in the newly restored section makes Wright’s novel particularly urgent ... The novel’s full publication, then, may help us recognize this history more fully. The novel’s republication may also illuminate other continuities in Wright’s fiction, for example his interest in blending European philosophical movements with his experience as a Black American ... this new publication of The Man Who Lived Underground will even draw our attention to more constructive possibilities in Wright’s work.
Wright wrote this mythic, crescendo odyssey, this molten tragedy of tyranny and the destruction of a life, at the start of WWII, 10 years before Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man appeared. But despite the resounding success of Native Son , Wright’s publisher rejected this lacerating tale. Now, finally, this devastating inquiry into oppression and delusion, this timeless tour de force, emerges in full, the work Wright was most passionate about, as he explains in the profoundly illuminating essay, Memories of My Grandmother,” also published here for the first time. This blazing literary meteor should land in every collection.
Wright’s brutal realism still resonates 80 years later ... at times pulses with a certain pulp fiction sensibility, located somewhere between Wright’s usual gritty realism and a more heightened, fabulist realm ... Enigmatic and haunting, Wright’s restored novel adds layers to his legacy as one of the leading Black writers in American literary history.
Wright’s prolific and prophetic use of language shows what happens when the tables are turned and an individual who is stripped of everything but his body can then, as an act of freedom, strip the value from everything else. The added layer of race further subverts the ideals that go along with what society alleges are the right things to desire—Christianity, money, and life. Daniels rejects these desires. While above ground, he anxiously awaited the birth of his child. While underground, Daniels sees a dead Black baby floating in the muck like a discarded doll. He pushes it away because it is too much of a reminder of the problems of Blackness on the surface ... Wright makes clear it is a precarious walk through life as a Black man. His criticism of this treacherous existence is made more prescient as America staggers from the real-life trauma of police shootings causing the deaths of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago and 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, MN, all while following the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white policeman responsible for the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man.
The latest and arguably the greatest of Richard Wright’s striking shadow books, starts off like a story ripped from today’s headlines, although it was written, submitted for publication, and summarily rejected in 1941 ... That opening scene is as searing, vivid, infuriating as anything in Native Son . But what follows is nobody’s protest novel. The Man Who Lived Underground soon abandons Native Son-style naturalism and takes a swift and unexpected allegorical turn, as the wrongly accused Fred Daniels spots a dislodged manhole cover and escapes into the sewers ... a compact and hypnotically gripping novel that many readers will hungrily consume in a single setting ... Wright cites, in particular, blues lyrics’ tendency to portray disparate, resonant scenes in successive verses without attempting to arrange or connect their contents in a conventional or cohesive narrative structure ... In its winding subterranean travelogue, and profoundly evocative, allegorical blues surrealism, The Man Who Lived Underground reads less like a follow-up to Wright’s Native Son than an excavated ancestor to Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad .
The power and pain of Wright’s writing are evident in this wrenching novel, which was rejected by his publisher in 1942, shortly after the release of Native Son ... Wright makes the impact of racist policing palpable as the story builds to a gut-punch ending, and the inclusion of his essay Memories of My Grandmother illuminates his inspiration for the book. This nightmarish tale of racist terror resonates.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright, finally published in full ... Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world. A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
