Cross Damon, a twenty-six-year-old Black postal worker in Chicago, is intellectually restless, heavily in debt, drinking, and trapped in relationships he wants to escape. When a subway accident kills men near him and he is mistakenly reported dead, Damon seizes the chance to disappear, assumes a new identity, and moves to New York. Freedom without accountability, however, draws him into deception, sexual entanglement, Communist Party politics, and a series of murders committed to protect his invented life. Pursued by District Attorney Ely Houston, who understands him almost too well, Damon is forced to confront what his experiment in absolute freedom has cost. Wright's first full novel after Native Son (1940), The Outsider is his most explicitly existentialist fiction, testing ideas about race, power, ideology, and moral responsibility in Cold War America.
Author: Richard Wright ยท Original publisher: Harper & Brothers (New York), 1953
