Hart has degrees in English literature and creative writing and is a published writer of literary themes. In this essay, she compares the personal, social, and historical circumstances surrounding Moody's book with Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy.

In Moody's autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi readers learn that Moody was born in Centreville, Mississippi. This small Southern town, as it turns out, is only about fifty miles south of Richard Wright's birthplace, Roxie, Mississippi. The proximity of these towns and these writers' shared African-American ancestry make their life stories strangely similar. However, their autobiographies are significantly marked by the different time-frames in which the authors grew up, Wright in the 1920s and 1930s and Moody in the 1950s and 1960s.

Juxtaposing Wright's Black Boy and Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi suggests changes in black experience in the South during two turbulent periods and gives views of...