Native Son

Native Son is a novel written by the African American writer Richard Wright. Harper and Brothers published the novel in 1940. The novel sold 250,000 copies in the first three weeks of its release and soon became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It is the saga of a black teen from Chicago's South Side, named Bigger Thomas, who in the midst of gaining an opportunity to escape the poverty and racism of his life in the Chicago slums accidentally murders a young white girl named Mary Dalton, for whom he works as a chauffeur. The story reflects Wright's experiences as a young black man in the United States, born into poverty, racial oppression, and suffering from self-hatred.

Richard Wright was born in 1908 in Natchez, Mississippi, on a plantation. The area where he grew up was one of the poorest areas in Mississippi and was very strict in maintaining racial segregation between whites and blacks. The Wright family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, when Wright was young, but when Wright's father, Nathan Wright, deserted the family for another woman, Wright, his brother, and his now invalid mother, Ella, moved to Jackson, Mississippi. Wright was a direct witness to the oppression and violence of the era of racial segregation in the American south. His uncle, Silas, was murdered in Arkansas by whites. These same whites also threatened to kill Wright's entire family.

In 1927, he moved to Chicago, Illinois. His mother and brother migrated to Chicago a short time later. Wright worked nights as a postal clerk and soon became engrossed in reading many of the well-known writers in history, including Edgar Allan Poe, T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, and Nickolai Gogol. He began writing and publishing poetry, short fiction, and literary reviews at this time, mostly for communist publications. His collection of short stories, Uncle Tom's Children, published in 1937, focuses upon life in the racially segregated south. Native Son was published on March 1, 1940. The book is written in three parts: “Fear,” “Flight,” and “Fate.” “Fear” details the series of events that leads to the murder, “Flight” is Bigger's attempt to escape his actions, and “Fate” is the resolution of the story, Bigger's trial for murder, and his acceptance of the fate that racial oppression and poverty in the United States presented to young African American men at the time of the novel.

Native Son was a major publication in American literature in 1940. The tragedy and horror of racial oppression had never been presented in such stark terms and with such brutal honesty. Most of the major newspapers at the time reviewed the book, and its violence and overt protest message against racism remains a part of its historical legacy. Time and Newsweek gave the book great attention. Time magazine's review was especially controversial because the title of the review in March 1940 was “Bad Nigger.”

In reviewing the book, the Chicago Defender described Native Son as a “penetrating, realistic clinical examination of a raw open wound which is yet bleeding.” It added that the publication, unlike any other book until then, had plumbed “blacker depths of human experience than American literature has yet had …” Poet and English professor Sterling Brown, Wright's friend, called [Page 1593]the book a “literary phenomenon.” Book critic Irving Howe wrote that “the day Native Son appeared, American culture changed forever.”

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