Richard Wright's non-fiction story "The Library Card," is taken from Black Boy, a book about his own life experiences growing up as an African-American (also called "blacks" or "Negroes") in the southern part of the United States during the 1920s-30s. At that time, whites in the south had a cruel system of power over the blacks (the "Jim Crow" system), took away the rights of black people, and tried to keep them from learning anything. In order to read, Wright had to pretend that the books he was getting from the library were for a white worker.
He describes the effect when he began reading the books of H.L. Mencken:
That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words . . . Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons?
[...] I ran across many words whose meanings I did not know, and I either looked them up in a dictionary or, before I had a chance to do that, encountered the word in a context that made its meaning clear. But what strange world was this? I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
This is the power of great literature: to give you experience outside of your own life, to find new ways of looking at the world. Novels are "fiction," yes, but you can still learn a lot from them; they help you develop your personal view of the world. In the case of Richard Wright, they helped him open a window outside his own narrow life, and caused him to become a writer.
What do you read and why?
