Comparing the Innocent Criminal in Black Boy, Uncle Toms Children, Nat

The Innocent Criminal in vague Boy, Uncle Toms Children, Native tidings, and The Outsider It is in all probability a mere accident that I never killed, Richard Wright commented offhandedly in an interview with Robert Moss (596). After reading several of Wrights works, one can considerably understand what Wright means by this statement. In his books desolate Boy, Uncle Toms Children, Native intelligence, and The Outsider, Wright suggests that black-and-blue society has transformed black people into criminals. The source of this claim comes from Wrights person-to-person experiences as a Negro in the Deep South. Whether pushed to crime from fate or for personal fulfillment and self-realization, the protagonists of Wrights works are innocent criminals they eff that the ultimate crime for which they are cosmos punished is the crime of being black. Circumstances created by a racist social order stain the characters in intolerable positions that coerce them into villainous ac tivities. In his autobiographical novel, Black Boy, Wright supports this theory using himself as an example. In the tradition of the slave autobiography, Black Boy provides details of Wrights life from early childhood to his arrival in Chicago. As Joyce Ann Joyce says, Black Boy ...is a realistic and poetic notice of the hunger Wright endured as a child, his closeness to his mother, the effect of his mothers illness, his problems with his father, his fathers desertion, the violence he experienced from his mothers relatives, his love of words and books, his discovery of racism and his developing racial consciousness, his fight against his mothers and grandmothers religion, his scanty education, ... and the development of his individuality... ...chard Wright. New York Harcourt, 1969. Rpt. in Richard Wrights Native Son Modern Critical Interpretations. New York Chelsea House, 1988. Moss, Robert F. Caged Misery. Saturday Review. Jan. 21, 1978, 45-7. Rpt. in Contemporary Liter ary Criticism. Vol. 14. Detroit Gale, 1980. Skerrett, Joseph T., younger Composing Bigger Wright and the Making of Native Son. in Richard Wrights Native Son Modern Critical Interpretations. New York Chelsea House, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York Harper, 1944. _____. How Bigger Was Born. Saturday Review. June 1, 1940, n.pag. Rpt. in Native Son. New York Harper, 1940. _____. Native Son. New York Harper, 1940. _____. The Outsider. New York Harper, 1953. _____. Uncle Toms Children. New York Harper, 1936.