But Wright did not immediately resume work on Black Hope. Instead, he put it aside, as he recounts in “Memories of My Grandmother,” to undertake another novel, inspired by a bizarre story about a man who lived for more than a year in the sewers beneath Los Angeles, staging a series of burglaries from an underground bunker. “The Crime Hollywood Couldn’t Believe,” by Hal Fletcher, based on an account by Lieutenant C. W. Gains of the Los Angeles Police Department, appeared in the August 1941 issue of True Detective magazine. This crime story provided the kernel of the novel, which grew and became connected in Wright’s mind with an amalgam of different elements from his own life—his maternal grandmother’s religious disposition and understanding of the world, his fascination with the Universal Pictures Invisible Man films, and his interest in surrealism and Negro folk art. This transformation of experience into art is the subject of “Memories of My Grandmother.”

The Man Who Lived Underground seemed to write itself after Richard and Ellen Wright moved in July 1941 from Harlem to 11 Revere Place in Brooklyn. The couple had married four months earlier and Ellen was now expecting. “Ellen and Dick have a charming, secluded place,” Arna Bontemps reported to Langston Hughes in a letter of November 4, 1941. “Dick has a new dictaphone and all the trimmings, and is he going to town? Knocked out his new novel about religious life among Negroes in a couple of months. Written at white heat, as they say, ‘The Man Who Lived Underground.’” On December 12, 1941, Paul Reynolds submitted the novel to Harper, explaining to Frederica Montgomery, “Here is the new novel by Richard Wright entitled THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGOUND which I spoke to Mr. Aswell about this morning.” The “new novel” was not the one Aswell was expecting. But Wright was very keen on The Man Who Lived Underground. After sending the typescript to Reynolds in December, he wrote to thank him for his efforts, remarking that it was “the first time I’ve really tried to step beyond the straight black-white stuff.” In “Memories of My Grandmother,” written just before or after the novel was submitted to Harper, Wright states—speaking now to his imagined readers—that “I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration . . . than The Man Who Lived Underground.” What happened next is not entirely clear, but evidently neither Reynolds nor Aswell shared the author’s enthusiasm.