Restored Richard Wright novel hits bestseller lists

More than 60 years after his death, Richard Wright is again a bestselling author and very much in line with the present. The Man Who Lived Underground, a short novel written in the 1940s and never pub

More than 60 years after his death, Richard Wright is again a bestselling author and very much in line with the present. The Man Who Lived Underground, a short novel written in the 1940s and never published in full until this spring, is the surreal but credible story of a Black man who is tortured by police into confessing to a double murder he didn’t commit. He escapes into the city’s sewer system. Like an inversion of the American road novel or a tale of space travel, Fred Daniels inhabits a world outside the world, making up the rules as he goes along and seeing his old life in a new way. At one point, he breaks into a real estate office that collects money from poor Black people. Daniels finds a wad of money, and helps himself to a typewriter, radio and cleaver, among other items.