• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3657 0

masturbation. This change also required him to revise other passages further on, including the prosecutor’s speech at Bigger’s trial. Other changes were also requested: toning down explicit sexual language, altering details of plot, and shortening the speeches of Bigger’s lawyer and the district attorney. A few paragraphs were added, and some changes may have been made to avoid resetting long stretches of type. On September 28, 1939, Aswell wrote to Wright: “I have looked over your revisions, and they seem to me to take care of everything essential. I want, however, to look them over once more just to make sure that we haven’t missed anything. As for the question of Bigger’s articulateness at the end, it is my recollection that only one person questioned this, and that most of them had not noticed it in reading the book and did not attach great importance to it when it was pointed out. My hunch is to let it stand as you have it. There is no news as yet, but there may be shortly.” Later, on January 11, 1940, Aswell wrote in a letter to Wright, “We’ve had a cable from London that Gollancz will bring out an English edition. In this connection, you will be interested to know that Gollancz turned it down flatly when they reviewed the first uncorrected proofs. After you made the changes for the Book Club, we sent Gollancz a revised set, and this apparently made them change their minds and they accepted it.”

By January 1940, the Book-of-the-Month Club had decided to accept the novel. The changes requested by the book club had previously been incorporated into a new set of proofs, which Wright reviewed in November 1939. Native Son, with an introduction by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, was published on March 1, 1940, by Harper and Brothers and was a dual-selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. All subsequent editions used this revised text. In July 1940, Wright sent Aswell a list of three corrections to be made in later printings. These were not incorporated into the plates until late 1941 or early 1942. All have to do with Chicago geography: “Adams Street” becomes “Seventh Street” at 65:4 in this volume; “northward” becomes “westward” at 173:16; and “HALSTEAD” (a street name) becomes “HALSTED” at 255:33.

Because major alterations were made in Native Son as a consequence of the book club’s intervention in the publication process, the text of Native Son presented in this volume is that of the bound page proofs, which were sent to Book-of-the-Month Club in August 1939, and which are now held at the Beinecke Library (Zan W936 94C na) at Yale University. The three corrections Wright sent to Aswell in 1940 have been incorporated into the text. All changes in wording that Wright made between August 1939 and the publication of the first edition in 1940 are presented in the notes.

“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” was delivered as a lecture on March 12, 1940, at Columbia University and was delivered again a few weeks later at the Schomberg Library in Harlem. Most of the text appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature for June 1, 1940, and a more condensed version was published in Negro Digest in the fall of 1940. The first complete printed text was published by Harper and Brothers as a separate 39-page pamphlet in August 1940. Harper and Brothers had intended to use the essay as an introduction to a special “Author’s Edition” of Native Son, but when sales slowed, they put off the special edition and issued the essay in pamphlet form. Harper and Brothers added the essay to later printings of Native Son in early 1942, using the same plates as the pamphlet. This volume prints the text of “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” from the 1940 pamphlet published by Harper and Brothers.

This volume presents the texts of the original editions or typescripts chosen for inclusion; it does not attempt to reproduce features of the typographic design, such as the display capitalization of chapter openings. The texts are reproduced without change, except for the correction of typographical errors (and the inclusion of the three corrections requested by Wright in Native Son).