This casebook gathers together the most important critical responses to Richard Wright’s autobiography. It includes a 1945 interview with Richard Wright, contemporary reviews of Black Boy written by W.E.B. Du Bois, Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison, and eight critical essays. These essays address a range of topics including the circumstances of the book’s original publication in 1945; the relationship between the novel and Wright’s actual biography; the African-American autobiographical tradition; the influences of various writers and literary movements on Black Boy; and the impact of African-American vernacular and oral performance on Wright’s autobiography.