Native Son
Richard Wright (1940)
“The most violent and uncomfortable novel in the American literary canon — and the one that most honestly tells the truth about what racism does to the human soul.”
At a Glance
Bigger Thomas, a twenty-year-old Black man living in poverty on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s, takes a job as chauffeur for the wealthy Dalton family. He accidentally kills their daughter Mary and then deliberately murders his own girlfriend Bessie to hide the crime. He is caught, tried, and sentenced to death. His Communist lawyer Boris Max argues that Bigger is the product of a racist society that made his violence inevitable. The novel refuses to let any party — liberal, Communist, racist, or reader — feel comfortable.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Native Son was the first novel by a Black author to be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection — reaching a mass white American audience that had never been asked to inhabit a Black man's interiority. It sold 200,000 copies in its first month. James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison both defined their work partly in response to it — Ellison's Invisible Man is, among other things, an argument with Wright about what Black literature can and should do.
Diction Profile
Wright's narration is journalistic-literary — precise, clinical, without sentimentality. Dialogue is heavily vernacular. The gap between narration and dialogue is one of the novel's primary formal tensions.
Moderate