Richard Wright on the power of books

The face of the South that I had known was hostile and forbidding, and yet out of all the conflicts and the curses, the blows and the anger, the tension and the terror, I had somehow gotten the idea that life could be different, could be lived in a fuller and richer manner. As had happened when I had fled the orphan home, I was now running more away from something than toward something. But that did not matter to me. My mood was: I've got to get away; I cant't stay here.

But what was it that always made me feel that way? What was it that made of conscious of possibilities? From where in this southern darkness had I caught a sense of freedom?...

It had been only through books - at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions - that I had managed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books....

It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism that had evoked in me vague glimpses of life's possibilities. Of course, I had never seen or met the men who wrote the books I read, and the kind of world in which they lived was as alien to me as the moon. But what had enabled me to overcome my chronic distrust was these books - written by men like Dresier, Masters, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis - seemed defensively critical of the straitened American environment. These writers seemed to feel that America could be shaped nearer to the hearts of those who lived in it. And it was of these novels and stories and articles, out of the emotional impact of imaginative constructions of heroic or tragic deeds, that I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth from an unseen light, and in my leaving I was groping toward that invisible light, always trying to keep my face so set and turned that I would not lose the hope of its faint promise, using it as my justification for action.

-from the notes on pg. 412-4

This quote from a section that was added to the 1945 edition as a conclusion after the second part ["The Horror and the Glory" on his life in Chicago in the 30's] was cut from the work (Wright "wrote in his journal that pressure from communists had led the book club to ask him to drop the second section, which dealt with his involvement with the Communist Party in Chicago") -from the end of the new HarperPerennial edition

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