In his novels, Wright enlarged upon the themes he discovered in his own life. But fiction never has the same authority as autobiography because art, by its very nature, is devious; an author creates personality types and manipulates them for a certain preconceived result. Autobiography has the revolutionary value of "telling it like it is." At the time that he wrote Black Boy, Wright was immersed in Marxist ideology and Communist party activities. In an article he published in New Challenge, a black literary monthly started in 1934, he wrote: "It is through a Marxian conception of reality and society that the maximum degree of freedom in thought and feeling can be gained for the Negro writer. Further, this dramatic Marxist vision, when consciously grasped, endows the writer with a sense of dignity which no other vision can give."
With this vision he wrote his autobiography and thereby put the reality of living experience into Marxist ideology. The book is not a mere record of personal catastrophes, but a form of social protest intended to change the society it describes.
Some of the historical events taking place around Wright, both as a boy and as a man, of course, helped to strengthen these attitudes. His father, for instance, was one among thousands of blacks involved in the Great Migration away from the southern countryside into the cities. This took place preceding and during World War I. His father was one of the casualties in this migration, so Richard was thrown back into Jim Crow society.
When Wright started his own migration northward in 1925, the country was on the brink of the Great Depression. Until the beginning of World War II, every citizen black and white was part of a culture suffering so badly from economic collapse that there was little opportunity to think in terms of pure art. Harlem was the center of black culture, just as Greenwich Village was a center of white culture; but both of these groups were highly influenced by political, rather than aesthetic, events.
