Restored Richard Wright novel hits bestseller lists

More than 60 years after his death, Richard Wright is again a bestselling author

NEW YORK -- 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. “He did not feel that he was stealing, for the cleaver, the radio, and the money were on the same level of value, all meant the same thing to him,” Wright observes. “They were the toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him.”