Native Son

Bigger Thomas, twenty years old on Chicago’s South Side, takes a job as a chauffeur for a rich white family, kills their daughter by accident, and then acts — and the last third of the novel is his trial, argued by a Communist lawyer as an indictment of the city that produced him. Wright wrote it to be impossible to sentimentalise, and said so. It was the first novel by a Black American author chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club and an immediate best-seller; it has been contested ever since, most famously by James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” and it is frequently challenged in schools for its violence and language.

Context: Richard Wright (1908-1960) was born on a Mississippi plantation and came to Chicago in the Great Migration; the 1940 Book-of-the-Month Club edition was cut, and the full text was restored in 1991.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• Richard Wright — the author.
• Chicago — the city the novel indicts.
• Poverty — the condition the book refuses to soften.