Richard Wright was born in 1908, near Natchez Mississippi. At fifteen, he left home and went to Memphis, where he worked for two years. In 1934, he went to Chicago where, in 1935, he worked on the Federal Writers' Project, a federal government project in the United States which was created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. His works include Native Son, a protest novel which saw him become the first Black bestselling author in America, which was published in 1940.
Native Son introduces us to Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the novel, a young man chained to the slums of Chicago, poverty, and a life of limited opportunities, all because of the colour of his skin and an unaccepting world. And so, Bigger is a complex mix of fear, abandoned hope, frustration, and yearning. Cowed by the white world's lack of understanding, and resenting that lack of understanding, understandably, he harbours an anger. But it is an anger borne of an unjust world.
In an introduction to the novel, the author, Richard Wright, explains that "If I had known only one Bigger I would not have written Native Son." The character of Bigger Thomas, it seems, is an amalgamation of men that Wright had known throughout the course of his life. These were Black men who violated the laws of a society that was not accepting of them anyway, regardless of whether they kowtowed to the rules that bound them, or not.
From the first scene of the novel, Bigger's world is a small and dreary one. The novel opens with a new day in his life, where we see him and his family waking in the single room they inhabit. He, his mother, his sister, and his brother, all live in this one room, a room they also share with any rodent that might make a home there.
Though this is a work of fiction, it is a fiction that is also a work of protest. This was a fiction that reflected the reality the author had seen.
The central themes of the novel are racial, specifically the lives of Black Americans in the twentieth century. And it was a shock for 1940s readers. Indeed, the book still packs a punch today, and, one fears, there is still relevance in the work.
Though the book has drawn some criticism, especially for its violence, it has also been credited, along with other of Wright's work, as being a driving force for changing race relations in America.
Bigger is not a pure hero, and he commits acts of violence that are hard for the reader to forgive. But forgiveness and fairytale was never Wright's intention; he wanted to present the world of his novel in brutal honesty. An honesty that the reader could not ignore or forget.
As a work of protest, it has affected ideas and attitudes, and is considered by literary critics, amongst others, as having been a force for change in the social and intellectual history of America in the twentieth century. Writer, Amiri Baraka, said, "Wright was one of the people who made me conscious of the need to struggle."
This is more than a novel, it is a milestone in Black literary history.
You can purchase a copy of Native Son by Richard Wright here.
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