A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel of racism, injustice, brutality, survival, and the American Black experience, written in the 1940s that speaks to our own times by the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy. Fred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured and beaten until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. Daniels then escapes, and takes up residence in the sewers below the city streets. 

This is the simple, horrible premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, a masterpiece written during the early 1940s, the same period as his landmark books Native Son and Black Boy, that he was unable to publish during his lifetime. A significantly truncated version of the story would eventually be included in the posthumous short story collection Eight Men (1961).

Now, for the first time, this incendiary novel about race and violence in America, the work that meant more to Wright than any other, is published in the form that Wright intended. The book also includes as an afterword an unpublished essay that Wright meant to accompany the novel, in which he wrote: "I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration, or executed any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom, or expressed myself in a way that flowed more naturally from my own personal background, reading, experiences, and feelings than The Man Who Lived Underground."