Native Son

Richard’s Wright’s debut novel Native Son was an immediate success upon its publication in 1940, selling 250,000 copies in three weeks. Today, it is widely recognized as not only Wright’s greatest work, but as one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century.

In his essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (1940), Wright explains that he based the protagonist of the novel on five young Black men he had known as a child. These five Biggers had been hardened and angry at white people and the systemic oppression that kept them down, sometimes turning that anger inward and bullying other Black youths. They flouted Jim Crow laws and lived their lives with the conviction that asserting their humanity and equality by refusing to comply was more important than the consequences. Wright hoped that Native Son would shock and horrify the white liberals who read his books, course-correcting what he felt was the sentimentality of his earlier book of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children. Native Son was the first major American novel that looked deeply and unflinchingly into the rage and fragmentation of Black identity that resulted from oppression.

Plot Summary

Bigger Thomas, a twenty-year-old Black man, wakes up early in the squalid one-room apartment he shares with his mother and two siblings.