Editions

Native Son

Native Son

Discover Richard Wright’s brutal and gripping masterpiece.

'The most important and celebrated novel of Negro life to have appeared in America' James Baldwin

Gripping and furious, Native Son follows Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. Unwittingly involved in a wealthy woman's death, he is hunted relentlessly, baited by prejudiced officials, charged with murder and driven to acknowledge a strange pride in his crime. Native Son shocked readers on its first publication in 1940 and went on to make Richard Wright the first bestselling black writer in America.

Reviews

  • Before he was 40, Wright dominated literary America, publishing four books in seven years, each a triumph in its genre. His first novel, Native Son (1940), sold at the rate of 2,000 copies a day, making Wright the first best-selling black writer in the country's history. Black Boy (1945), his memoir of his Southern childhood, was a bigger success, selling more than a half-million copies.

    New York Times

  • Richard Wright's Native Son is, in addition to being a masterpiece, a Great American Novel

    Guardian

  • Unsettling urban violence from the man who was Mosley's inspiration

    The Times

  • Native Son is the story of a young black man who kills two white women; and it was the first book - published in 1940 - to suggest that black Americans could actually get angry. When it came out, it beat The Grapes of Wrath in the best-seller lists

    Independent

More from this Author

About the Author

Richard Wright

Richard Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908. As a child he lived in Memphis, Tennessee, then in an orphanage, and with various relatives. He left home at fifteen and returned to Memphis for two years to work, and in 1934 went to Chicago, where in 1935 he began to work on the Federal Writers' Project. He published Uncle Tom's Children in 1938 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the following year. His other titles include his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), and The Outsider (1953). After the war Richard Wright went to live in Paris with his wife and daughters, remaining there until his death in 1960.

Richard Wright

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