In the 1940s, in a segregationist city in the southern United States, a black man, wrongly accused of a double murder, manages to escape his torturers before sinking into the city’s sewers. For days, his underground journey will allow him to discover, as a free man, the underside of the surfaces: pipes, backrooms, behind the scenes of the exploitation of man by man. Remained in the writer’s drawers after his publisher refused it in 1942, known as a short story in a very different version, The man who lived undergroundby Richard Wright (1908-1960), one of the most influential African-American writers of the 20the century – it opened the way for authors like Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes or James Baldwin – comes to us today in its complete version. If the author of Black Boy denounces racism, he also engages in a subtle critique of capitalism – even a rewriting of the allegory of the cave. Richard Wright explains the context in Memories of my grandmotherwhich accompanies this novel still full of resonance.
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