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I hesitated between 3 and 4 stars for Black Boy. I felt that it was similar in structure to Invisible Man by Ellison but the writing, in my opinion was inferior. Like Ellison, the novel starts with Wright's childhood in the South - deserted by his father and always hungry (the original title was American Hunger - he teaches himself to read (a dangerous occupation for a black person in the South of the 20s and discovers and suffers from poverty and racism. However, the narrative was quite plodding in the beginning and only really interested me when he started reading Sinclair Lewis, Proust and Dostoyevsky. When he is a little older, he manages to move north, but unlike the Invisible Man, he chooses Chicago where he has family rather than Harlem. He has a conflictual relationship with the Communist Party there from which he is ultimately rejected. The book ends rather suddenly after this rejection. Perhaps Wright's message and intent in writing this memoir is best summed up a quote from Part 2 in Chapter XV, "but sharing the culture that condemns him, and seeing that a lust for trash is what blinds the nation to his claims, is what sets storms to rolling in his soul."
It is not a very optimistic book and - sorry to be repetitive - I really found Invisible Man far more engaging and even deeper when exploring the same themes of racism's deep corruption of everything it touches and how black intellectuals had to struggle against white supremacists as well as a slavery-damaged Black community which to a great extent had lost their dignity - a dignity that both Wright and Ellison fought to restore during both of their careers. It is fair to say that without Wright and Ellison, there would have never been a MLK or Obama.