![]() Richard Wright's story of his childhood made him one of America's most popular writers in the 1940s. "When I got to the end of Chapter 2 and I read that he only had an orange for Christmas and that he sucked it slowly to make it last, I spit the caramels out," says Julia. Here's some of what she read: By the time Wright was 12, he'd set fire to his mother's home, been sent to an orphanage and been lured into a Memphis bar and plied with liquor. "Then I went into the kitchen and took some chocolate caramels and went to bed with Black Boy and the chocolate caramels." ![]() I maybe would have preferred a mystery," she recalls. She was 12 at the time, and she found Black Boy on the shelf one evening when her parents were at the theater. It was in Paris that Julia first encountered her father's famous autobiography. Just a generation later, his daughter grew up in a very different world in the late 1940s, Wright moved the family to Paris, where Julia would later attend the Sorbonne. "Smoke obscured the vision and cinders drifted into the house, into our beds, into our kitchens, into our food and a tarlike smell was always in the air," he wrote. ![]() In his autobiography, Black Boy, Wright described the neighborhood he lived in as a child as swarming with "rats, cats, dogs, fortune tellers, cripples, blind men, whores, salesmen, rent collectors and children." African-American author Richard Wright had a very different upbringing from his daughter, Julia. ![]()
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