WHEN THE ‘NATIVE SON’ BECAME ‘THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND’
ON DECEMBER 12, 1941, the literary agent Paul Reynolds contacted Edward Asner, one of the top editors at the publishing house Harper & Brothers, with what should have come as welcome news. “Here,” Reynolds announced, “is the new novel by Richard Wright.”
A year earlier, Harper & Brothers had published Native Son, Wright’s searing novel of racism and violence, and watched as the book ascended the bestseller lists and launched its author into literary stardom. “Few other recent novels have been preceded by more advanced critical acclamation, or lived up to the expectations they aroused so well,” gushed The New York Times. Expectations were running even higher for Wright’s next fictional outing.
Yet Asner was aghast at what his star author had just submitted. The Man Who Lived Underground told the story of Fred Daniels, a black laborer thrust into a Kafkaesque waking nightmare after he is falsely accused of murdering the white couple that employs him and then tortured by the police until he signs a confession. Able to briefly evade his captors, Daniels escapes into the sewer system of his unnamed city, from which he tunnels into various basements and cellars to secretly observe “the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him.” The book begins as a gritty work of realism before taking an unexpected turn toward the weird and surrealistic.
Asner and his colleagues disliked the manuscript and refused to publish it. Wright’s lengthy depiction of police brutality was “unbearable,” declared one internal reviewer. Though
