ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how did the preoccupation with space and movement register in Depression Era life writing and how do crisis, space and mobility interact in autobiographical texts of the time. It also explores these questions in a tentative way with the help of Richard Wright's Black Boy and Jerre Mangione's An Ethnic At Large, two texts from different times and different social spaces. The chapter discusses the way in which the written self emerges from the configuration of crisis, mobility, space and the available patterns or protocols afforded by genre and popular media. For both, Mangione and Wright, the context of the Great Depression was instrumental in their choice of career: The intellectual climate of the time but also the opportunities afforded by the Federal Writers' Project nudged them towards writing. For both, the act of writing entails the effort to open, to re-define and to appropriate spaces, which had been traditionally closed to the ethnic and racial other.
