The Man Who Lived Underground

Written by Richard Wright

Narrated by Ethan Herisse

New York Times Bestseller • One of the Best Books of the Year by Time magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and Esquire, and one of Oprah’s 15 Favorite Books of the Year

Read by actor Ethan Herisse

From the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy, the novel he was unable to publish during his lifetime—an explosive story of racism, injustice, brutality, and survival. ""Not just Wright's masterwork, but also a milestone in African American literature . . . One of those indispensable works that reminds all its readers that, whether we are in the flow of life or somehow separated from it, above- or belowground, we are all human."" (Gene Seymour, CNN.com)

“The Man Who Lived Underground reminds us that any ‘greatest writers of the 20th century’ list that doesn’t start and end with Richard Wright is laughable. It might very well be Wright’s most brilliantly crafted, and ominously foretelling, book.”—Kiese Laymon

Fred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city’s sewer system.

This is the devastating premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, written between his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), at the height of his creative powers. Now, for the first time, by special arrangement between the Library of America and the author’s estate, the full text of the work that meant more to Wright than any other (“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration”) is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories of My Grandmother.” Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, contributes an afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caedmon
• Release date: Apr 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9780062971470

Richard Wright

Richard Wright won international renown for his powerful and visceral depiction of the black experience. He stands today alongside such African-American luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and two of his novels, Native Son and Black Boy, are required reading in high schools and colleges across the nation. He died in 1960.

Reviews for The Man Who Lived Underground

[Linda Ivey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It was pretty deep. I thought I understood the premise of the story being police brutality and bad race relations but then the author describes what led to this book along with his description of the methodology behind some of his other famous works. It was so sad!

[dandiercks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“The Man Who Lived Underground” is a short novel that Richard Wright wrote in 1942. Until now it has only appeared in print as a short story.Wright wrote this between his two masterpieces “Native Son” (1940) and “Black Boy” (1945). Like Wright’s protagonist in “Native Son,” Bigger Thomas, the main character in “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Fred Daniels, is a black man on the run during a time when the white man lynched first and asked questions later. Daniels flees the police after being falsely accused of a double murder. He takes refuge in the sewers below the unnamed city where the story takes place. His adventures below ground are symbolic, sometimes border on bizarre, and provide much material for readers to ponder and discuss. The ending is somewhat surreal and arguably predictable. I think this book would be an excellent novel to teach in high school and college English classes. My guess is English professors will begin adding “The Man Who Lived Underground” to their syllabi.

[ericlee_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The opening pages of this book by one of America’s greatest writers were a shock both to Richard Wright’s agent and publisher. They were so violent and painful to read that the book could not be published when first written in the early 1940s. It has taken some 80 years before the full text can finally appear. And what was the shocking bit? The book opens with the arrest of a Black man accused of a murder he did not commit, and the brutal beatings and abuse he suffers at the hands of white policemen. No wonder the book is being hailed as relevant to our time.But anyone expecting a realistic story will be disappointed, because Wright has ambitions far beyond telling a story of racial injustice, which he had done before so successfully. As he explains in a long essay at the end of the book, this novella is an attempt to get inside the head of the author’s grandmother who raised him. A deeply religious woman, she lived in a world of her own making as does the main character in this book when he literally goes underground.An unusual book, painful to read in parts, but intelligent and gripping as well.

[scottjpearson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In the 1940s, Richard Wright published two seminal works (Black Boy and Native Son). Both dealt with the topic of race in America. Wright also wrote another full-length work (this one), but it was rejected by publishers for being too controversial about race. However, during the recent Black Lives Matter movement, many saw the censorship of this book as being a historical injustice that needed correction. So in 2021, this story was published for the world to read… and oh, am I grateful for reading it.Wright tells the story of a black man who is suddenly accused of double murder. In truth, he was peacefully working for a next-door neighbor during the crime, was active in his church, has a pregnant wife, and lives a morally upstanding life. He is arrested and forced into signing a confession by brutal police tactics and a corrupt district attorney. However, he escapes custody and eludes recapture by going down a sewer line. Underground, he develops a life of his own where he sees the world as it actually is. Three days later, he returns to the world to find that it has changed and it is all-too-much the same.The philosophical depth of this storyline is evident. It reminds me of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, only retold in a modern context. Further, this book is extraordinarily timely, some 70-80 years after its inscription. Sadly, some in the police can still maintain a white-supremacist status quo. Also sadly, it took George Floyd’s death to awaken us that Wright was indeed onto something real in American culture. Yes, this book is not hyperbole but a work of realistic fiction. Like other works of conscience, it speaks to reality more clearly than reading newspapers or Internet websites.This book obviously touched a sensitive nerve when originally proposed. It obviously can touch a nerve today, too. But that nerve deserves to be touched again and again until we train our society to respond appropriately. I’m glad that this work has been trumpeted recently by so many in the literary industry. Its place in the American literary canon should be found and preserved. This book is ideal and suitable for college campuses where open discussion of these issues can take place. It also needs to become fodder for anyone interested in serious discussion about race in America, including book clubs. In his era, Wright saw his society clearer than society was willing to let him. The question now becomes transformed: Will we let Wright’s message speak to us today, and will we do something about it?

[richardderus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Rating: 5* of fiveThe Publisher Says: A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel from the 1940s by the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy.Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes—or is permitted to escape—from the precinct and takes up residence in the sewers below the streets of Chicago.This is the simple, horrible premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, a masterpiece written in the same period as his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) that he was unable to publish in his lifetime. Only small parts of it have appeared in print, and in a significantly redacted form it would eventually be included in the short story collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, by special arrangement with the author’s estate, the full text of the work that meant more to Wright than any other (“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration”) is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories of My Grandmother.” Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, contributes an afterword.I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.My Review: Richard Wright was one of the twentieth century's crop of Great American Storytellers, a writer whose entire life of creation was a gift to a country that did not deserve his passionate voice calling into the face of its indifference that we can be better, do better, and must in order to survive.People my age were required to read Native Son in high school English, and I am so very glad we were. I wouldn't have picked up the book any other way. It needed to be shoved on me. And wonder of wonders, the Austin (Texas) Independent School District of the early 1970s did. It was a tough thing to let myself believe, that people simply but sincerely hated for no better reason than someone was a different skin color than they were. I assumed all those yahoos were just performing their snotty, hateful idiocy like they did their fake homophobia; it seemed to me that racism against Black and Hispanic students was the same. Anything to look cool, after all, and these were teenagers whose ideas of Cool were neither self-reflective nor rebellious enough to have progressed from the 1950s their own parents were stuck in.Then we read the equally astounding true-crime (I call racism a crime and am not likely to stop doing so) Black Like Me, an account of a white man passing as Black in the Jim Crow South. It too was gut-wrenching, but was different in kind than the novel Native Son. A factual report...well, I am quite sure that my own racism got hard, hard knocks that year. (I am fully aware that I'm complicit in racist society, that in no way am I "not a racist" just because I support Black political candidates and so on.) It's a pity we couldn't have read this jaw-dropping, intense, visceral evocation of the Other as refiner and perfecter of his Othering. It is the apotheosis of Otherness and Othering that this intense story tells its readers.Anyone who's paid me any attention knows that I can be run off from continuing a read by child abuse, by use of the n-word, by cruelty to animals...the list goes on...and not a few unfriendlies are smirking in anticipation of taxing me with this book's abusive, rage-filled, n-word-bombing ethos...how can I give this five stars and still abandon ship with content warnings in other, arguably less offensive cases? Because Richard Wright never does a single thing to make the awfulness of PoV character Fred Daniels's world sensational. The author isn't kidding around, bedizening a story with nastiness to provoke a response. He is telling a story about how Othering a man will, over time, after many small and large blows and much deliberate infliction of every kind of pain, turn him in to the thing that he was not, did not want to be, and could not bear to know that he now was.It worked, in its honesty and its clarity of purpose. I left the sewer Fred lived in without regret, without revulsion, and with the most horrified, profound acceptance of Fred as he was abused and neglected into being. Acceptance of his re-creation, transformation.In the inexcusably hate-filled twenty-first century, we are fighting the battle that Fred lost all over again. There are wins...the conviction of Ahmaud Arbery's murderers...there are defeats, the gerrymandering cases standing out to me as disasters to Black people...but the trend is towards, as it ever was, the endless and pointless perpetuation of hate based on stupidity among the haters and truculence among the hated.Books like this are strong medicine against both ends of the spectrum. Fred, a victim, sees what the System does to people, and ultimately still surrenders to it. Not to fight against the dehumanizing and brutalizing actions and inactions of the system that allows Fred to exist in the literal sewers is to acquiesce in the process of creating more Freds...and that is a moral wrong and a societal tragedy. Author Wright doesn't allow his readers the luxury of redemption. This book remained unpublished for seventy years because it is the most hopeless document of degradation's triumph I've ever read. White people of the 1940s would've been offended by the clear-eyed assertion of police violence as it happened...nowadays that illusion is gone...but they wouldn't have wanted to read about a good man surrendering his humanity regardless of that knee-jerk response. The accusing fingers pointing back at them as they called out Author Wright for his bleak treatment of Fred (theirs was the system he succumbed to, after all) were simply too on-the-nose.There is an extended essay included with the novel entitled “Memories of My Grandmother” that enables our appalled eyes to see where so much of the story we've just read originated. The fact that Christian religion played such a big role in Wright's formation into a man capable of the kind of wordsmithing he does isn't a big surprise. I'm very grateful that the author's daughter required the essay to be published within the book containing the novel...it's a long piece and, even if you're on the fence about reading the novel, I hope you'll consider procuring it to read the essay alone. It is a marvelous explication of how each generation forms the next, for good and ill.What Author Wright isn't, in the writing of this story, is subtle. The metaphors defining it simply aren't debatable: Whites own the sunshine and consign the Blacks to the literal sewers to eke out whatever existences they can. A Black man who's innocent of any crime is shoved into the sewer with the rest of the leavings because he's never had a place in the sunshine that was truly his. As he copes increasingly poorly with the sewers, he's not allowed to leave them; he's run away from the white police, deprived them of their fun of torturing and eventually killing him, so they say "stay there and die."The author doesn't, then, offer Redemption to either side. It's a very uncharitable and un-Christian thing to withhold. But he's got a reason, does Author Wright: "Chickens come home to roost, don’t they?" his daughter quotes him as saying.They very much do. The perch they roost on is, in this rare and exquisitely painful read, your complicit soul.

[lostinalibrary · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

African American Fred Daniels has just finished his job in a white neighbourhood when he is stopped by the police and accused of a horrendous double murder which occurred right next door. Daniels is aware of the odds of a Black man being found ‘not guilty’ by an all-white jury or, for that matter, living long enough to make it to trial so he finally claims guilt after being tortured. When the cops take him to visit his wife in the hospital after she gives birth to their child, not out of compassion but to make him suffer even more, he takes the opportunity to escape. He disappears into the sewer system from which he begins a new life underground.The Man Who Lived Underground was written by Richard Wright in the ‘40s but was reduced to a short story by his publishers who refused to publish it in this, it’s original form. This is not an easy read or at least not for me. The two word that seemed best to sum up my reaction to it were shocking and disturbing perhaps in most part because, despite its age, this story still very much relevant to today. A brilliant and important addition to Richard Wright’s lexicon.Thanks to Netgalley and Library of America for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review

[formerenglishteacher · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“The Man Who Lived Underground” is a short novel that Richard Wright wrote in 1942. Until now it has only appeared in print as a short story.Wright wrote this between his two masterpieces “Native Son” (1940) and “Black Boy” (1945). Like Wright’s protagonist in “Native Son,” Bigger Thomas, the main character in “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Fred Daniels, is a black man on the run during a time when the white man lynched first and asked questions later. Daniels flees the police after being falsely accused of a double murder. He takes refuge in the sewers below the unnamed city where the story takes place. His adventures below ground are symbolic, sometimes border on bizarre, and provide much material for readers to ponder and discuss. The ending is somewhat surreal and arguably predictable. I think this book would be an excellent novel to teach in high school and college English classes. My guess is English professors will begin adding “The Man Who Lived Underground” to their syllabi.

[beth.clarke · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's hard to believe this novella was written in the 1940s when the theme of racial injustice is relatively the same. Wright's words are captivating.

[grandpahobo_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very powerful story.

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright is the first publication of the novel that Wright had to cut down into a short story because his publishers would not publish it. As such, this is an important work in rounding out his legacy as well as in understanding his goals in writing.Wright was not a writer of just one basic voice or style, so while this is different from some of his writing it is also very similar to other works. Though I have read all of his work and lean toward his nonfiction as much as his fiction, I have only taught three of his books and a couple of his stories, and two of the books were nonfiction. I find this book to fit very nicely within his early work.If you have read the short story of the same name, don't think that this is just a longer version of the same story. This is the original version and the story is one that was chopped up, "compressed," and even had the ending changed. So no, this isn't simply the full "unedited" version, this is the complete version in idea and concept, which is quite different from the story. I highly recommend this to readers of Wright as well as those interested in both Black writing in the United States and the history of publishing and how it has often avoided the uncomfortable works if that discomfort will be the white readers. The essays (both his and his granddaughter's) are also insightful.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.