Native Son
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Native Son (ISBN 0060809779) is a novel published in 1940 and written by Richard Wright. It tells the story of Bigger Thomas, an African-American struggling for acceptance in Chicago of the 1930s. His life, however, is doomed from the outset: after Bigger accidentally kills a white woman, he runs from the police, kills his girlfriend and is then caught and put on trial.
Semi-autobiographical in tone, the story is a powerful statement about the inevitable fate of African-Americans as a result of racial inequality and social injustice. As Bigger's lawyer points out, there is no escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American, since they are the necessary product of the society that raised them.
The book was an immediate best-seller, selling 250,000 hardcover copies in its initial run. The book was also one of the earliest successful attempts to explain the racial divide in America in terms of the social conditions imposed on African-Americans by the dominant white society.
It has been filmed twice ; once in the 1950s and again in the 1980s. Neither version is considered to have been an artistic success, despite Wright's involvement in the earlier version.
Native Son has led James Baldwin to write his famous book with essays Notes of a Native Son (1955).
See also: Black Boy