SOURCE: Thaddeus, Janice. “The Metamorphosis of Richard Wright's Black Boy.” American Literature 57, no. 2 (May 1985): 199-214.

In the following essay, Thaddeus chronicles the publishing history of Black Boy and traces the book's metamorphosis from an open autobiography to a closed one.

There are two kinds of autobiography—defined and open. In a defined autobiography, the writer presents his life as a finished product. He is likely to have reached a plateau, a moment of resolution which allows him to recollect emotion in tranquility. This feeling enables him to create a firm setting for his reliable self, to see this self in relief against society or history. Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, for instance, is a defined autobiography, a public document, moving undeviatingly from self-denial to self-discovery. It rests on the fulcrum of: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see...