The Man Who Lived Underground

Richard Wright’s novel about racist police violence has finally been published.

Nearly 80 years ago, Richard Wright became one of the most famous Black writers in the United States with the publication of Native Son, a novel whose searing critique of systemic racism made it a best-seller and inspired a generation of Black writers.

In 1941, Wright wrote a new novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, but publishers refused to release it, in part because the book was filled with graphic descriptions of police brutality by white officers against a Black man. His manuscript was largely forgotten until his daughter Julia Wright unearthed it at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.

“The Man Who Lived Underground was not published in the 1940s because white publishers did not want to highlight white supremacist police violence upon a Black man because it was too close to home,” says Julia Wright. “It’s a bit like lifting the stone and not wanting the worms, the racist worms underneath, to be seen.”

In The Man Who Lived Underground, Fred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city’s sewer system.

Richard Wright once said of the novel, “I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration or executed any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom, or expressed myself in a way that flowed more naturally from my own personal background, reading, experiences and feelings.”