SOURCE: Atkinson, Michael. “Richard Wright's ‘Big Boy Leaves Home’ and a Tale from Ovid: A Metamorphosis Transformed.” Studies in Short Fiction 24, no. 3, (summer 1987): 251-61.

In the following essay, Atkinson draws parallels between the stories of Actaeon in the Metamorphoses, and Big Boy in Richard Wright's “Big Boy Leaves Home.”

There is an ache in reading Richard Wright's fiction, and we feel it from first to last. It is the ache of difference, of distance between what might and should be possible for the human, and what fate and circumstance impose when that human is an outsider, is black. It is paradigmatically present in one of Wright's earliest stories, one of his most enduring and frequently anthologized, “Big Boy Leaves Home.” This story continues to move us and be the object of our study, not only because of its starkly accurate social detail, a closely woven fabric of dialect...