Many readers know about Richard Wright’s famous 1940 debut novel, “Native Son,” about a 20-year-old Black man who can’t escape a system designed for him to fail and accidentally kills a young white woman as a result. Long considered a pioneering work of African American literature, it was also thought to suffer from constraints on what an author could really say — or be allowed to publish — in Jim Crow America.
Fewer readers know that, in 1942, Wright submitted to his publisher a considerably more radical work. “The Man Who Lived Underground” follows Fred Daniels, a Black man who retreats into the sewers after being tortured by police and framed for a double homicide.
At the time, publishers believed white readers didn’t want to be reminded of America’s history of violence against Black Americans. They wanted something more along the lines of “Native Son,” which sold 215,000 copies in its first three weeks of publication, making Wright America’s leading Black author.
"['Native Son’ depicted] Black on white violence or Black on Black violence,” said Library of America editorial director John Kulka. “But white on Black violence was different. We can imagine [publishers] had more difficulty with ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’ and its graphic depictions of police brutality.”
Across nearly 50 pages in the book’s opening chapters, Wright detailed explicit violence by police against a man who eventually confesses to a crime he did not commit. In the 1940s, that made parts of the novel untouchable. Kerker Quinn, the editor of the small literary magazine Accent, called the early chapters “unbearable.” Wright’s publisher, Harper & Brothers, rejected the typescript. It wouldn’t be published in its entirety until this month, nearly 80 years later, in a new edition from the Library of America.
“It just seemed such a departure from ‘Native Son,’” said Kulka, adding that Harper “simply did not recognize ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’ as a worthy successor. They were looking for another substantial work of literary naturalism, not a weird, short, allegorical novel about a man who flees into the city sewers.”
In a companion essay to the novel, Wright said he considered it to be his finest work, written “in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom” and flowing more completely “from my own personal background” than anything else to date.
But after being turned down by publishers, the author published a truncated version, which appeared first in the 1944 anthology “Cross-Section: A Collection of New American Writing” and later in the posthumous 1961 collection “Eight Men.” Accent also published two excerpts from the story. Excised were the violent first section and parts of the ending that were considered too dark.
Readers had to wait another half-century for the Library of America, a nonprofit that publishes classic American literature in authoritative new editions, to release an unexpurgated version. The story appears alongside an unpublished essay, “Memories of My Grandmother,” which Wright intended as either a preface or afterword.
