Uncle Tom's Children

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Summary

'Wright's unrelentingly bleak landscape was not merely that of the Deep South, or of Chicago, but that of the world, the human heart' James Baldwin

Natural disasters, cold-blooded murders, political agitation - all haunt these dark, dramatic novellas set in an American Deep South still corrupted by its slave-owning past. But at the heart of each are the stories of the men, women and children whose resistance against oppression will come to define their lives.

Originally published in 1938, Uncle Tom's Children was Richard Wright's first published work. It would establish his reputation as both a powerful storyteller and a fierce chronicler of racism, violence and oppression in America at the time.

About the author

Richard Wright

Richard Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908, to a sharecropping family of ex-slaves. His mother was a schoolteacher but, abandoned by her husband, she had to resort to menial jobs to feed her two sons before suffering a series of strokes. During a childhood scarred by hunger, Wright lived in Memphis, Tennessee, then in an orphanage, and with various relatives. He left home at fifteen, returned to Memphis for two years to work, and in 1934 went to Chicago where he was employed at the Post Office before beginning work at the Federal Writers' Project in 1935. He published Uncle Tom's Children in 1938 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year. His other books include Native Son (1940), his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), and The Outsider (1953). After the war, Richard Wright chose expatriation and went to live in Paris with his family, remaining there until his death in 1960.

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