SOURCE: “Mothers and Their Defining Role: The Autobiographies of Richard Wright, George Lamming, and Camara Laye,” in Griot, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 54-61.

In the following essay, Williams compares the strong mother figures in Wright's Black Boy, Laye's The Dark Child, and Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, and analyzes their effect on the lives of their children.

The autobiographies of George Lamming. Richard Wright and Camara Laye have much in common with many other autobiographies which have emerged out of the European tradition. They share with other writers of the autobiography a common intention, which is to make themselves “the subject of [their] book and to impart some sense of it to the reader” (Olney 23). In an article entitled “The Negro Writer and his World,” George Lamming himself wrote that “the modern black writer's endeavor is like that of every other writer whose work is a...