SOURCE: "Black Autobiography in Africa and America," in Black Academy Review, Vol. 2, No. 1&2, Spring-Summer, 1971, pp. 61-70.

In the following essay, Bruchac discusses similarities between Black Boy by Richard Wright and The Dark Child by Camara Laye and places these works in the tradition of black autobiography that begins with The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789).

Autobiography has always been one of the most important of forms in black writing, both in Africa and in the Americas. And though there are often great differences between the life stories of such men as Richard Wright, whose tale of his childhood in the Delta south, Black Boy, has become an American classic since its publication in 1945 and Camara Laye, whose nostalgically idealized recounting of his youth in Guinea, The Dark Child, has also become a classic in its own right since its first publication in French...