There’s a great moment in Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945) that I’d like to share with you. I use it in my Introduction to Literature course, and I think you’ll see why. It’s about the day Wright read a book that changed his life.
Wright was born in 1908, in Natchez, Mississippi. His father abandoned the family when Wright was five, and his boyhood was traumatic, marked by poverty, constant movement from place to place, racism and segregation, intermittent schooling, and extreme violence.
Sometime in 1926–27, Wright, age eighteen, living in Memphis, Tennessee, employed at an optical company, came across an irate reference in a Southern newspaper to someone named H. L. Mencken. Wright wondered who this Mencken was, and what he’d written that led to this angry condemnation.
African Americans could not check out books from the Memphis public library, so Wright borrowed a white coworker’s card and forged a note to the librarian that said he was picking up books for this coworker, not for himself. Wright didn’t know the titles of any of Mencken’s books; he took the two the librarian gave him.
I said nothing. She stamped the card and handed me the books. Not daring to glance at them, I went out of the library, fearing that the woman would call me back for further questioning. A block away from the library I opened one of the books and read a title: A Book of Prefaces. I was nearing my nineteenth birthday and I did not know how to pronounce the word “preface.” I thumbed the pages and saw strange words and strange names. I shook my head, disappointed. I looked at the other book; it was called Prejudices. I knew what that word meant; I had heard it all my life. And right off I was on guard against Mencken’s books. Why would a man want to call a book Prejudices? The word was so stained with all my memories of racial hate that I could not conceive of anybody using it for a title. Perhaps I had made a mistake about Mencken? A man who had prejudices must be wrong.
The first book by Mencken that Wright read was A Book of Prefaces (1917), and the second was part of a series of six volumes, each titled Prejudices, published 1919–27: collections of reviews and essays on literature, contemporary culture, the South, gender, religion, and other topics.
“That night in my rented room,” Wright continues,
while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words…. Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon? No. It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.
Wright was alone, alienated from his surroundings, next to no money, white supremacy everywhere, no deliverance, no hope. Suddenly there flashed before his eyes a way out: the prospect for freedom after all, embodied in the vibrant language of the fearless Mencken, the agent and symbol of resistance and liberation.
From his study of Mencken’s pages, Wright compiled a list of authors, his homemade syllabus for a course in literature:
Occasionally I glanced up to reassure myself that I was alone in the room. Who were these men about whom Mencken was talking so passionately? Who was Anatole France? Joseph Conrad? Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Dostoevski, George Moore, Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant, Tolstoy, Frank Harris, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Stephen Crane, Zola, Norris, Gorky, Bergson, Ibsen, Balzac, Bernard Shaw, Dumas, Poe, Thomas Mann, O. Henry, Dreiser, H. G. Wells, Gogol, T. S. Eliot, Gide, Baudelaire, Edgar Lee Masters, Stendhal, Turgenev, Huneker, Nietzsche, and scores of others? Were these men real? Did they exist or had they existed? And how did one pronounce their names?
All this came from Wright’s immersion in Mencken, starting with A Book of Prefaces:
I ran across many words whose meanings I did not know, and I either looked them up in a dictionary or, before I had a chance to do that, encountered the word in a context that made its meaning clear. But what strange world was this? I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
Many African American writers have spoken in similar terms about the awakening they received from books. Ralph Ellison recalled that he “read voraciously,” that “the act of reading” was “an apprenticeship in freedom.” James Baldwin read “every single book I could get my hands on.… Books taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive.”
There are vivid accounts by white American writers as well, including Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Ray Bradbury, and John Updike, all of whom celebrate the thrill, magic, and wonder of reading books. But this mind- and heart-transforming encounter has always carried a special intensity for African American writers, reaching from Frederick Douglass to Ta-Nehisi Coates, because of the centuries-long prohibitions against literacy imposed on the enslaved in America and the denial of educational equality and open access to books in the decades following the Civil War. For many African Americans, reading has been an epiphany, a form of insurgency and escape. Often undertaken in private, even in secrecy, reading for them was revelatory, a conversion.
In my Introduction to Literature course, I tell students that reading a book did this for Richard Wright and that it can do the same for them. It’s a lesson they need now more than ever, in an era when reading is in decline. In the mid-1970s, forty percent of young Americans, ages fifteen to thirty, said they were reading six or more books on their own each year. This figure has fallen to thirteen percent. Forty percent say they dislike reading altogether.
That’s the stark reality, but as an advocate for and teacher of close reading for many years, I remain resolute and hopeful. Past and present, I’ve found that students respond with genuine interest and pleasure when I lead them into a novel or poem and show them how to engage it in slow motion. I’m part of the resistance, someone who’s committed to the theory and practice of close reading—to intellectual and imaginative work that’s both rigorous and exhilarating. As Mencken says in A Book of Prefaces, when we’re reading with attentiveness and passion, “there’s the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”
In classrooms where books are valued, and where close reading is performed, students learn to perceive the detail, tone, and complexity of literary language. They enjoy the experience, marvel at the writers, and feel energized themselves. Like Richard Wright, they’re transformed by “something new” that makes “the look of the world different.”
William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.
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