The Man Who Lived Underground

by Richard Wright

The Man Who Lived Underground was written in an era when lynching and beatings of Black Americans were sufficiently widespread in the United States (not just in the South) to enforce both Jim Crow legislation and unwritten codes of behavior governing interactions between Blacks and whites.

I was too sensual for Protestant religion; perhaps some other form of religion might have snared me; I don’t know. . . .

What fascinated me about religion was its manifestation in the personalities of others, especially when those manifestations related to me in one way or another and had something to do with my life.

Her religious faith was so deep and rigid, so uncompromising and fanatic, that it could not manifest itself continuously in daily life. It was capricious, disjointed, brittle, chopped to bits by the daily necessity to live.

I always wanted to see and touch what I believed, or arrive at its reality through modes of deductive, inductive, or associational reasoning.