Richard Wright could not, from his earliest years, tolerate this repression, and Black Boy is the chronicle of his alienation, not only from white society, but from his own people. His protest springs from what the Spanish writer Unamuno calls "the tragic sense of life"; that is, it is more than a record of personal abuses. In Black Boy, the protest is both personal and metaphysical a cry of anguish in the face of the human condition. Tragedy is what comes of an individual's efforts to overcome the human condition. This is the spirit in which Black Boy was written out of a sense of tragedy yet it does not stop there.
What gives the book its unique place in American literature is its tone, as opposed to its content or structure. Its tone is that of the Blues. Lyrical and ironic, it is the song that follows the reality of pure tragedy. It accepts all that has happened and creates art from the pain of suffering. Ralph Ellison has written that "as a form, the Blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically." There could be no better way to describe Black Boy and its unique voice in American letters.
