Wright’s connection to the Communist Party had been at the center of his intellectual, artistic, and social life for years. He believed in its message of class unity. Some of his earliest serious writing was published in magazines the party supported, and he wrote for The Daily Worker while completing his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children. Much of his social circle had been assembled from the party’s ranks, and he and his wife, Ellen Wright, were both active members. Breaking with the party would mean losing friends and allies and part of his identity, while gaining a great many enemies. But Wright was prepared to do it. The military draft was a looming threat for him. And he would never support the war or encourage Black men to fight on America’s behalf in a segregated Army.
There was no way for Wright to know how the war would proceed, what the party would ask of him, and whether he would be forced to defy it. Amid all that uncertainty, he turned his attention to the composition of a new novel.
When Wright gave his speech, he had been working on a book titled Black Hope for about two years. It was an ambitious, naturalistic novel that readers were likely to accept as the anticipated follow-up to Native Son. But the following month, he set it aside and began writing a new book, a meditation on isolation, survival, and the ability of faith to make sense of the world’s chaos and predations. He called it The Man Who Lived Underground, and it is being published in full for the first time this month by the Library of America.
Wright worked on his manuscript primarily in his Brooklyn apartment at 11 Revere Place. He used an Ediphone—a recording device that etched a simulacrum of his voice onto a spinning wax cylinder when he spoke into its handset—to narrate his story, then edited his work by playing it back and revising as he listened. And the effect of that process can be heard in the text, which strides forward with the hurried rhythm of someone speaking to themselves aloud.
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.