Big Boy Leaves Home

The short story “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1936) is the first published work of Richard Wright (1908-1960), a celebrated African American author who is best known for his 1940 protest novel Native Son. Most of Wright’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction deal with the experiences of working-class Black people (especially men) in the United States. His protagonists, like “Big Boy,” struggle against overt racism and racist violence in their communities, ultimately facing crises that force them to fight back.

“Big Boy Leaves Home” was initially published as a standalone story in a 1936 anthology of contemporary American fiction and poetry called The New Caravan. It eventually became the first of four novellas printed in Wright’s debut book Uncle Tom’s Children, which was published by Harper in 1938. The collection was so well received that it was reissued two years later with an additional novella at the end and an “autobiographical sketch” called “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” appended to the beginning. Each story in the collection evokes a different incident of shocking racial violence in the rural American South, starting with accidental or interpersonal violence and moving toward conscious responses to violence that involve collective action and self-sacrifice. “Big Boy Leaves Home”—which focuses on a kid who is forced to fight for his own survival—is the beginning of that bigger arc.