Native Son
| Author | Richard Wright |
|---|---|
| Published | 1940 |
| Pages | 504 |
| Recommended | 2 times |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Richard Wright’s 1940 novel of Bigger Thomas, a young man on Chicago’s South Side whose killing of his rich white employers’ daughter becomes, at his trial, an indictment of the city that produced him — written, as Wright said, to be impossible to sentimentalise. |
Native Son
Where I heard about it
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Spotted at Powell’s Books at PDX — August 2026 (Books photo album)
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Dissident Teacher — on A Library to Build Great Americans, the Substack writer’s 468-title curriculum (December 2025), in the Ages 13–99+ band under Fiction.
About this edition
Bigger, twenty years old, takes a job as a chauffeur, kills the daughter by accident, and then acts; the last third of the novel is his trial, argued by a Communist lawyer. 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. 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.