Coming Of Age By Richard Wright

As Edward Estlin Cummings once said, “It takes courage to grow up and become who you are.” Though many people spend their childhood trying to be like everyone else, there are some people who aren’t afraid to be who they really are. While reading The Giver by Lois Lowry, there are many examples of growing up shown by symbols like the Ceremony of the Twelve, bicycles, and each child’s rights.

Anne Moody learned about the importance of race early in her life. Having been born and raised in an impoverished black family from the South, she experienced first-hand the disparity in the lives of Whites and Blacks.

Anne Moody is the author of Coming of Age in Mississippi which was originally published in 1968. Anne Moody is a famous African American Mississippi author who was born in Wilkinson County, Mississippi on September 15, 1940. She was the eldest of nine children born to Fred and Elnire Moody. While growing up in Mississippi, Moody attended a segregated school where she was an outstanding scholar. Moody cleaned houses in order to keep food on the table and clothes on her family members’ backs. In 1961, Moody earned scholarship in basketball to Natchez Junior College where she was involved in sit-ins, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to fight for civil rights for blacks in the south. Upon her completion at Natchez Junior College, she went to Tougaloo College where she received her Bachelor of Science degree in 1964. Moody continued her civil rights activities North at Cornell University where she served as a civil rights project coordinator from 1964 to 1965. Moody joined all of these civil rights groups partially because of the lynching of Emmitt Till. Moody’s literature includes Coming of Age in Mississippi, Mr. Death: Four Stories and Famous People Stories: 4th Grade Reading Level. Moody’s books have helped people understand what life was like in the segregated South before and during the civil rights movement. Moody recently passed away on February 5, 2015 at the age of 74.

Richard Wright is the author of numerous short stories and books, two of which include The Man Who was Almost a Man and Big Boy Leaves Home. The first story, The Man Who was Almost a Man, follows seventeen year old David, who one days becomes angered by the way he is treated by older men. The second story, Big Boy Leaves Home, follows four young African Americans who one day skip school. Richard Wright has a very unique writing style, which helps him develop his characters very fast. Author Richard Wright’s short stories are both written to illustrate how one’s decisions can affect their future.

Benjamin Alire Saenz in his novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of The Universe, John Knowles in his novel A Separate Peace, and Sarah Ladipo Manyika in her article “Coming of Age In The Time Of The Hoodie”, demonstrate that coming of age involves a loss of innocence.

In the story, Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne known as Essie Mae found out the meaning of racism at a young age and also see or heard what whites do to black people if they did not like what they was doing. She did not know that whites and blacks had their own place to sit and eat or why whites went to one school and blacks went to another. She just assumes that whites went to the school that was close to their neighborhood, but Essie Mae experience her first meaning of segregation when she met two white children she often play with at the movies. Since she figure they was friends she thought she could sit with them at the movies but her mother was very furious with that when she seen Essie Mae, her sister, and brother getting ready to enter the white side of the movie theater. Her mother pulled them out the door and told them they was not allowed to sit with the white children let alone be seen with them. “Now all of sudden they were white, and their whiteness made them better” (pg202) made Essie Mae confused and she wanted to know what made them so better, what was their secret.When the whites start coming back over Essie Mae examine them by comparing what they had to what her sister and brother had trying to see what made them so different, but all she seen was color. This really open her eyes to racism and later lead some change in her life.

Getting older brings new challenges and experiences for children and adolescents as it is a difficult point in their lives. Poets and authors often involve the theme of growing up in their works which is expressed through the words of the narrator and speaker. The children face challenges growing up in “Bangs”, “On Turning Ten” and To Kill a Mockingbird, however each author uses different literary techniques to explore the idea of growing up. “Bangs” deals with the wish to live a carefree, youthful life again after having grown up. The speaker of the poem, mentions that when she had her bangs, her biggest problems involved “the ice cream man running out of strawberry”(5).

Coming of age is a recurring theme that is universally known throughout many different pieces of literature. Whether it’s influenced on true experiences, childhood memories, or even based on one’s current juvenile reality, many of theses works have a correlation between them that include many similar ordeals and struggles that the character goes through in order to metamorphosize into taking their first step out of childhood. One prominent theme that often appears is how one goes through and experiences what life is really like-- in other words, being exposed to a time of tribulation and other walls that stand in one’s path. Additionally, another theme that is how they lose

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” - Albert Einstein. This quote is talking about adolescents and everything that they learn when they’re young and how it shapes them in their future. Childhood is a rough time for everyone, and it can be hard to make the best of it;, fortunately it is only a fraction of the time that you will be around. You should treasure it while you can because eventually everyone has to grow up and change. Authors illustrate that in coming of age stories;, they do this through a variety of way but some main things that are common is there’s always a young child or children and they go through some experience of some kind that forces them to realize what the adult world is like.

In the autobiography Black Boy by Richard Wright, the narrator uses many examples to display his lack of hunger in the world. Wright was an African American boy who grew up in South during the early 1900’s, a time period known as the Jim Crow laws era. These laws depicted racial discrimination and segregation against Black people portraying racist turmoil in United States history. It was a difficult task for Wright to grow up in the South being an African American during this time period. Wright was born into poverty and dealt with many obstacles and hardships especially hunger. Aside from physical hunger, Wright also struggled to connect emotionally with people not only in his family, but also encounters with random people. Wright’s views the South as dark and cynical which motivates him to gain and fill his hunger for knowledge to get a better understanding of the world around him. Wright has many types of hunger that affect his everyday life. Growing up in the Jim Crow South era, hunger is a constant factor in Richard Wright’s life whether it is physically, emotionally, or even hunger for knowledge.

Through Margaret Mead’s ethnography, in the book Coming of Age in Samoa, we learn about the lives of women in Samoan culture. Young girls of Samoan culture have very little freedom in the beginning of their lives. Girls are expected to take care of the infants in their families until there is a younger and more capable girl that can provide care. Taking care of the babies in the family is a Samoan girl’s main responsibility as a child. The author further explains, “She also develops a number of simple techniques. She learns to weave firm square balls from palm leaves, to make pin-wheels of palm leaves or Frangipani blossoms…But in the case of the little girls all of these tasks are merely supplementary to the main business of baby-tending” (Mead 20). At a young age women are expected to attain skills in certain household tasks that help provide towards their Samoan families.

The definition of anxiety is something not easily come by. Søren Kierkegaard, a famous Danish philosopher who was widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher, once written, “And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor at night” (The Concept of Anxiety – Kierkegaard). In other words, Kierkegaard believes that anxiety is a malignant “torture” that causes people to suffer consistently from everyday life.

Many have compared life to a journey over the course of which, one experiences dozens of tumultuous changes and transitions. On this journey, the human body continually undergoes a developmental pattern of physical, mental, and social modifications. Even in the realm of literature, fictional characters inevitably follow this fate. In literature the stage, between childhood innocence and adulthood, characters transform in what is referred to as coming of age, otherwise known as adolescence. Because all humans experience this transition, it establishes coming of age as a timeless universal literary theme. Among coming of age novels include Lewis Carroll’s tale about a seven-year-old Victorian girl named Alice. In the novel Alice’s Adventures

The composer I have chosen to write about is Maurice Ravel. Maurice composed his songs in the Late Romantic period. During Maurice’s life many significant events occurred. In 1876 The Little Bighorn battle took place. Two years later in 1878 the Afghanistan War occurred, the U.S. Army entered Afghanistan on November 21st. In 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president of the United States. These are some of the significant events that occurred during Maurice Ravel’s life time.

Nicholas G. Carr initiated a discussion about the strategic importance of IT spending of companies in his Article "IT Doesn 't Matter" published in Harward business review , 2003. He also advises to reduce the spending on IT infrastructure by arguing the fact that IT become commodity rather than a strategic advantage.