Now, at forty-six, after having ventured into the world myself in search of knowledge that can only be distilled by allowing oneself to drift and become vulnerable, I find it is Plato’s cave that leaps out at me from the pages of The Man Who Lived Underground, and I am filled with an additional gratitude of a different kind. I was able to undertake journeys that did not break my mind, and to return with something of value, to a world that though still tone-deaf, may yet accept some of what I’ve carried back with me.

Malcolm Wright

December 1, 2020

Note on the Texts

UNTIL NOW readers have known Richard Wright’s narrative about a fugitive who escapes into the city sewers as a short story. But two years before the story “The Man Who Lived Underground” was first published in Edwin Seaver’s Cross-Section: An Anthology of New American Writing in 1944, and long before it appeared in his posthumous collection Eight Men (1961), Wright wrote a novel-length version of the narrative that Paul Reynolds, Wright’s agent, submitted to Edward Aswell at Harper & Brothers. Harper declined The Man Who Lived Underground, and the novel, different from the short story in significant ways, has remained unpublished. This volume presents for the first time two previously unpublished works by Richard Wright: the novel-length The Man Who Lived Underground and an essay written to accompany it entitled “Memories of My Grandmother.” A large amount of material pertaining to both works, including typescripts, notes, and correspondence, is held in the Richard Wright Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Other significant materials related to The Man Who Lived Underground are contained in the Selected Papers of Harper & Brothers and the Sylvia Beach Papers at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. The texts established by Library of America for The Man Who Lived Underground and “Memories of My Grandmother” are discussed below.

Wright worked on The Man Who Lived Underground for about nine months, from July 1941 to early spring 1942, shelving the novel-length version after the disappointment of Harper’s rejection. This was a busy, highly productive period in the author’s life, coming between his two most famous books, Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). He was also wrapping up work on his photo-documentary 12 Million Black Voices (1941) and struggling with a long novel about Black domestic workers (the still-unpublished Black Hope) that Reynolds and Aswell were trying to coax from their star author. Native Son had been a literary sensation, and the two men were eager to capitalize on its success and Wright’s new status as America’s leading Black author. On July 9, 1941, Aswell wrote to Wright, reporting that “Mrs. Montgomery [at Harper] says you telephoned yesterday to give your new address, and that you also reported that you have finished the picture book and are ready to get going again on the novel [Black Hope]. This is grand news. I have been hoping all along that the new novel could be ready in time to publish next spring.” In a letter of July 20, 1941, Wright reassured Aswell that “I am just about finished with the text for the picture book, and I am already toying with the beginning of the novel.”