This actually consists of a novella-length story, plus a nonfiction essay. The short story is the one of the title. It’s set in the 1940s(?) (that’s when it was originally written, anyway), and a black man, Fred, leaving work, just having been paid in cash, is “arrested” by the police and “questioned”/tortured. Initially not knowing even what they police were talking about, it turns out the neighbours of the people Fred worked for had been murdered in their home earlier in the day. Fred manages to escape and moves underground via the sewers from building to building for a few days.

The essay talked about how the author grew up with his very religious Grandmother and how some things from that experience related to this story.

Overall, I’m rating it ok. The essay got pretty philosophical, so wasn’t all that interesting to me. The story itself was better, but also a little bit odd while Fred was underground. I definitely did not see the end coming (but maybe I should have?). ( )

56. The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright
afterward Malcolm Wright (2021)
OPD: 2021 (written 1941-1942, with a shortened version published in 1944)
format: 228-page Kindle ebook
acquired: October 3 read: Oct 4-15 time reading: 5:44, 1.5 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Novel theme: Richard Wright
locations: unknown American city, probably southern
about the author: American author born on a Mississippi plantation, 1908-1960

This for me was a curiosity, part powerful, part quirky. Wright takes a close look at police brutality against African Americans (a point noted in his publisher's rejection documentation) and then an almost surreal look at a refugee living in American sewers. Fred Daniels, a good church-going upstanding person and expectant father, is arrested for a murder he knows nothing about. He's not questioned, but beat-up by an all-white police force demanding a confession. It's not clear where his mind was before this happens, but he gets rattled, and it seems his mind is never able to settle down. Instead, in the sewers he tunnels, and he stumbles across apparent odd truths about the basics in life - religion, death, money, entertainment, etc.

Maybe think Plato's cave. It's a combination of Wright's creativity and what I see has his semi-super-aware, semi-blind romantic mindset. It makes an odd combination of strange guy in a strange place doing strange things that don't quite make sense. In a long afterward, which Wright intended to be published with the novel, he explained the novel as a response to the stubborn illogical religious faith his grandmother followed and depended on, a source of conflict between he and his grandmother, his main parent during his older childhood.

This is a lost novel. Wright wrote it written during WW2, in 1942, but it was rejected for publication by his publisher. A shorter version was published in a journal, and later in a posthumous collection. Wright moved on, composing [Black Boy], his classic published in 1945. There he goes directly into his grandmother's religion and state of mind, and its impacts on him. The full version of this novel was first published in 2021, after Wright's grandson, Malcolm Wright, pushed for it.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/354226#8263418 ( )

The opening pages of this book by one of America’s greatest writers were a shock both to Richard Wright’s agent and publisher. They were so violent and painful to read that the book could not be published when first written in the early 1940s. It has taken some 80 years before the full text can finally appear. And what was the shocking bit? The book opens with the arrest of a Black man accused of a murder he did not commit, and the brutal beatings and abuse he suffers at the hands of white policemen. No wonder the book is being hailed as relevant to our time.

But anyone expecting a realistic story will be disappointed, because Wright has ambitions far beyond telling a story of racial injustice, which he had done before so successfully. As he explains in a long essay at the end of the book, this novella is an attempt to get inside the head of the author’s grandmother who raised him. A deeply religious woman, she lived in a world of her own making as does the main character in this book when he literally goes underground.

An unusual book, painful to read in parts, but intelligent and gripping as well. ( )

note: the following review, and the above stars, are for the title story only, not the three other items added into this volume -

“He had triumphed over the world aboveground. He was free!”

A black man is accused of killing two people, and the white police officers beat him until he signs a confession he never gave. He is able to escape into the sewers below the city, and while underneath has a series of adventures that seem to change him fundamentally. He is not the same when he resurfaces, but the world around him is.

I think this is an amazing story, which says a lot about the condition of the black man in the 1940's, which is to say, is not much different than it is now. When life in a sewer line is an upgrade, that says a lot about the life that one is forced to lead. The repugnant, torturous behavior of the white police officers has been echoed over and over in the eight decades since this was written, and the fictional character of Fred Daniels in this book can easily be compared to the real-life victims of police violence now. Richard Wright knew the truth all too well, and this book is still calling us out in 2023. An important read. ( )

In the 1940s, Richard Wright published two seminal works (Black Boy and Native Son). Both dealt with the topic of race in America. Wright also wrote another full-length work (this one), but it was rejected by publishers for being too controversial about race. However, during the recent Black Lives Matter movement, many saw the censorship of this book as being a historical injustice that needed correction. So in 2021, this story was published for the world to read… and oh, am I grateful for reading it.

Wright tells the story of a black man who is suddenly accused of double murder. In truth, he was peacefully working for a next-door neighbor during the crime, was active in his church, has a pregnant wife, and lives a morally upstanding life. He is arrested and forced into signing a confession by brutal police tactics and a corrupt district attorney. However, he escapes custody and eludes recapture by going down a sewer line. Underground, he develops a life of his own where he sees the world as it actually is. Three days later, he returns to the world to find that it has changed and it is all-too-much the same.

The philosophical depth of this storyline is evident. It reminds me of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, only retold in a modern context. Further, this book is extraordinarily timely, some 70-80 years after its inscription. Sadly, some in the police can still maintain a white-supremacist status quo. Also sadly, it took George Floyd’s death to awaken us that Wright was indeed onto something real in American culture. Yes, this book is not hyperbole but a work of realistic fiction. Like other works of conscience, it speaks to reality more clearly than reading newspapers or Internet websites.

This book obviously touched a sensitive nerve when originally proposed. It obviously can touch a nerve today, too. But that nerve deserves to be touched again and again until we train our society to respond appropriately. I’m glad that this work has been trumpeted recently by so many in the literary industry. Its place in the American literary canon should be found and preserved. This book is ideal and suitable for college campuses where open discussion of these issues can take place. It also needs to become fodder for anyone interested in serious discussion about race in America, including book clubs. In his era, Wright saw his society clearer than society was willing to let him. The question now becomes transformed: Will we let Wright’s message speak to us today, and will we do something about it? ( )