Books: Native Doesn't Live Here

THE OUTSIDER (405 pp.)—Richard Wright—Harper ($3.95).

When Novelist Richard Wright was a teen-ager in the South, he once forged a note and handed it to the local librarian: "Please let this nigger boy have the following books." Among the books he wanted was Dostoevsky's Poor People. From his own bitter experience of life, young Wright already knew just about all there was to know about poor people; he was looking for other kinds of enlightenment—eye-openers for young writers. In Dostoevsky he found his eye-opener, and in world Communism his herald. Less than 20 years...

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