Richard Wright and James Baldwin were drawn together as satellites of an American literary world contracted by prejudice. But besides differences of heritage and age—one a son of Mississippi, then Chicago; the other of Harlem, a generation behind—they were separated by a formal disagreement about life on the page. Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” first published in 1949 (later collected in “Notes of a Native Son”) made their aesthetic rift public, iconic. Baldwin wrote that Wright’s “Native Son,” not unlike its foremother, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” is undermined by its “virtuous rage,” and its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, “controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear.” Among certain jaded readers of the Negro canon (myself included), cultural memory has favored the younger writer’s discernment; his distaste for “Native Son” lingers. Yet the novel remains the work of Wright’s that occludes all others.
Even Baldwin admitted, eventually, that Wright possessed other registers. A year after Wright’s sudden death, in 1960, at the age of fifty-two, a posthumous collection of his fiction, “Eight Men,” was published. Writing on that volume in the essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” Baldwin confessed to “feeling that Wright, as he died, was acquiring a new tone, and a less uncertain esthetic distance, and a new depth.” One of the collected works that gave him this impression was “The Man Who Lived Underground,” a short story that followed a framed man named Fred Daniels on a journey through the dank underworld of an unnamed city’s sewage system, from which he gets glimpses of the world above. Baldwin wrote that the story exemplified Wright’s “ability to convey inward states by means of externals,” with its “series of brief, sharply cut-off tableaus, seen through chinks and cracks and keyholes.”
Wright originally wrote “The Man Who Lived Underground” as a novel, which has just been published, for the first time, by the Library of America, in collaboration with Wright’s eldest daughter, Julia. Wright wrote the manuscript in the fall of 1941, only a year after “Native Son,” partially expurgated at the request of the Book-of-the-Month Club, became a commercial sensation. Just a hundred and fifty-nine pages long, “The Man Who Lived Underground” begins with Daniels being detained and beaten by the police, for a crime no one genuinely believes he committed. He escapes custody and flees underground in a fugitive narrative inspired, in part, by a crime story published the same year, in the magazine True Detective. Wright’s publisher, Harper & Brothers, rejected the book. It was trimmed and published as a short story, in 1944, without, among other significant chunks of writing, the first section to explain what motivated Daniels’s descent.
