Hunted by the police for a crime he didn't commit, a man turns to the sewers and a life underground.

Struggling to get work, another turns to wearing his wife's clothes in a desperate last attempt.

Finding himself the object of derision, yet another man buys a gun only to discover its true power. Here are Richard Wright's stories of eight men - black men, living at violent odds with the white world around them. As suspenseful as they are excoriating, they stand alongside Wright's novels as some of the most powerful depictions of black America in the twentieth century.