Down by the Riverside by Richard Wright

Down by the Riverside by Richard Wright

A flood brings not only rising waters but the full force of a brutal, racist world

With the Mississippi flooding, a Black farmer struggles to get his pregnant wife to safety. In the chaos, a single desperate decision sets off a chain of events that cannot be undone. Down By the Riverside is Richard Wright’s unflinching novella of race, power and consequence. Starkly told and painfully resonant, it captures how quickly the world can turn – and who is forced to pay the price.

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Richard Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908, to a sharecropping family of ex-­slaves. His mother was a schoolteacher but, abandoned by her husband, she had to resort to menial jobs to feed her two sons before suffering a series of strokes. During a childhood scarred by hunger, Wright lived in Memphis, Tennessee, then in an orphanage, and with various relatives. He left home at fifteen, returned to Memphis for two years to work, and in 1934 went to Chicago where he was employed at the Post Office before beginning work at the Federal Writers' Project in 1935. He published Uncle Tom's Children in 1938 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year. His other books include Native Son (1940), his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), and The Outsider (1953). After the war, Richard Wright chose expatriation and went to live in Paris with his family, remaining there until his death in 1960.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781529986020
ISBN 10	1529986028
Title	Down by the Riverside
Author	Richard Wright
Series	Brief Encounters
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Vintage Classics
Year published	2026-07-02
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.