Native Son

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright’s powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

“A deep experience.” - The New Yorker

“Richard Wright’s masterpiece . . . taught me that it’s all right to have passion within your work, that you don’t need to shy away from politics in order to write fiction.” - Gloria Naylor

“There have only been two books in my life that have made me cry: the first 50 pages of Jane Eyre and the last 50 of Native Son. . . . Richard Wright’s masterpiece is in the school of protest novel. . . Native Son taught me that it’s all right to have passion within your work, that you don’t need to shy away from politics in order to write fiction.” - Gloria Naylor

“The Library of America has ensured that most of Wright’s major texts are now available as he wanted them to be read.” - Alfred Kazin, New York Times Book Review

“It’s difficult to write temperately of a book which abounds in such excitement, in so profound an understanding of human frailty.” - New York Herald Tribune

“An enormously stirring novel. . . a story to trouble midnight and the noon’s repose and to haunt the imagination.” - New York Times

“For terror in narrative, utter and compelling, there are few pages in modern American literature that will compare with this story.” - Saturday Review

“A powerfully blunt novel.” - Washington Post

“This new edition gives us a Native Son in which the key line in the key scene is restored to the great good fortune of American letters. The scene as we now have it is central both to an ongoing conversation among African-American writers and critics and to the consciousness among all American readers of what means to live in a multiracial society on which power splits among racial lines.” - Jack Miles, Los Angeles Times

“A novel of tremendous power and beauty.” - Newsweek

“The most powerful American novel to appear since The Grapes of Wrath. . . so overwhelming is its central drive, so gripping its mounting intensity.” - The New Yorker