Reality Learned Through Fiction

For centuries, literature has been seen as a form of escapism. Open a book; read an adventure. Find a new world with a book. Go on a vacation in your own living room; read a book. Modern-day libraries are coated like thick paint with such clichés, on posters and flyers and librarian lips. However, these clichés cannot be found in “Writing and Reading”, a short excerpt of Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Wright, like many heavy literates, did not read as a young man to escape or to go on an adventure. He read to connect to reality.
Before he happened upon the chance to read great literature, the “North symbolized to [Wright] all that [he] had not felt and seen” with “no relation whatever to what actually existed” (Wright 139). He had read before, of course, but only pulp stories and “Get-Rich-Quick” series—and even to his “naïve imagination” the possibilities presented in those works were “too remote” (Wright 139).
As a young workingman, he ...