Commonplace -- Squirrel cage -- Rats' alley.

"Written before Native Son, but originally published several years after Wright's death, Lawd Today! interweaves news bulletins, songs, exuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of one day in the life of a black Chicago postal clerk during the Depression." --From online

"Until the time of his death in 1960, Richard Wright 'was generally accounted the most gifted living American Negro writer". His most famous novels, Native Son, and Black Boy, had already gained a secure place as classics of Twentieth Century American fiction and all his work had become internationally famous. The posthumous publication of a new Richard Wright novel is, therefore and event of some literary significance. Lawd Today was written before the publication of Native Son had established Richard Wright as a major novelist. Although different in setting and treatment, Lawd Today displays the same harsh, unsentimental realism, the same fierce concern for the plight of the American Negro, as the later novel. Quite simply, Lawd Today traces a single heartbreaking day in the life of Jake Jackson, a postal clerk in depression-ridden Chicago. Jake is not an admirable man, not even a pleasant once, but before his nightmarish odyssey is done, the reader sees all too clearly that society has given Jake Jackson, like Bigger Thomas, no alternatives. Lawd Today is a brilliant and bitter novel. The recreation of Jake's sorded world is complete- Its ideas, its values, its economic and social realities, it superstitions and its lusts. Unfortunately, it is a world which with only superficial changes, continues to exist in many parts of present-day America." --From the dust jacket.

This item contains racialized language in the description that would be considered offensive today.

From the library of Roscoe and Oletta Proctor.