The Man Who Lived Underground

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

THE UNPUBLISHED MASTERPIECE FROM THE AUTHOR OF NATIVE SON AND BLACK BOY

Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighbourhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from the precinct and takes up residence in the sewers below the streets of Chicago.

This is the simple, horrible premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, a masterpiece written in the same period as his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) that he was unable to publish in his lifetime.

Now, for the first time, this incendiary novel about race and violence in America, the work that meant more to Wright than any other ('I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration'), is published in full, in the form that he intended.

© Richard Wright 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics Review

  • The Man Who Lived Underground is a masterpiece

    Time Magazine

  • Moves continuously forward with its masterful blend of action and reflection, a kind of philosophy on the run… Whether or not The Man Who Lived Underground is Wright’s single finest work, it must be counted among his most significant

    Wall Street Journal

  • Not just Wright’s masterwork, but also a milestone in African American literature… The Man Who Lived Underground is one of those indispensable works that reminds all its readers that, whether we are in the flow of life or somehow separated from it, above- or belowground, we are all human

    CNN

  • Propulsive, haunting… The graphic, gripping book ends with a revealing companion essay that further explains the themes of this searing novel

    Oprah Daily

  • The Man Who Lived Underground reminds us that any ‘greatest writers of the 20th century’ list that doesn’t start and end with Richard Wright is laughable. It might very well be Wright’s most brilliantly crafted, and ominously foretelling, book

    Kiese Laymon

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