Restored Richard Wright novel about race and violence hits US bestseller lists

Now, for the first time, the full text of Wright's incendiary novel about race and violence in America, is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories Of My Grandmother.” Photo: AP

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.