Native Son

Native Son is a 1940 novel written by African-American author Richard Wright. The novel tells the story of twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas, an African-American youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s.

    While not apologizing for Bigger’s crimes, Wright portrays a systemic inevitability behind them. Bigger’s lawyer makes the case there is not any escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American since they are the necessary product of the society which formed them and told them since birth who exactly they were supposed to be.

    “No American Negro exists,” James Baldwin once wrote, “who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull.” Frantz Fanon discusses the feeling in his 1952 essay, The Fact of Blackness. “In the end,” writes Fanon, “Bigger Thomas acts. To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world’s anticipation.”