Native Son - Richard Wright [7]
Set to be published in 1939 by Harper’s (which had brought out Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938), Native Son was selected by the influential Book-of-the-Month Club and issued as a main selection in 1940 (after Wright made revisions demanded by the club). That year, it sold some 250,000 copies, no doubt mainly to members of the club. However, sales of the book fell off sharply, according to at least one report, once prospective buyers understood that Native Son was not an entertaining detective story, as some had supposed, but a serious, even harrowing, text. The reviews, generally favorable, certainly remarked on the violence and gloom of the novel. Blacks were on the whole pleased by Wright’s success, although some had doubts about the wisdom of offering Bigger Thomas as an example of African American character to the white world. Alain Locke, a highly respected commentator on black American art and culture, noted that it had taken “artistic courage and integrity of the first order” for Wright to have ignored “both the squeamishness of the Negro minority and the deprecating bias of the prejudiced majority.”
Native Son made Wright easily the most respected black writer in America, and the most prosperous by far. In 1941, a stage production of the novel, directed by Orson Welles, only enhanced Wright’s fame. (A motion picture of the novel, photographed mainly in Argentina, with Wright himself cast as Bigger Thomas, was finished in 1950; however, it enjoyed little success, especially after censors in the United States ordered deep cuts.) In 1945, his autobiography, Black Boy, was also a bestseller; but Native Son remained the cornerstone of his success. In 1948, his reputation suffered undoubtedly from the adverse criticism of James Baldwin, who essentially launched his own career that year with an essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which dismissed Native Son as a piece of mere “protest” fiction, reductive of human character and thus fatally limited as art. In 1952, the appearance of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, with its dazzling modernist techniques, its lyricism, humor, and final optimism about America, also tended to make Native Son seem crude in comparison.
In the 1960s, however, with the dawning of the Black Power movement after the most bloody stage of the civil rights struggle, and the shocking upsurge of violent crime in the cities, especially among young black males, Wright’s novel increasingly seemed strikingly accurate and, indeed, prophetic. Later, in the 1980s, Wright’s reputation suffered again, this time under the scrutiny of feminist literary criticism, which could hardly miss the fact that, with few exceptions, the world of his fiction is fundamentally hostile to women, especially black women.
Nevertheless, Wright seems certain to continue to enjoy a lasting place of high honor in the African American and American literary traditions, and to be recognized as an author of world-class dimensions. While his overall reputation rests on a number of texts in different genres, including autobiography, essays, and travel writing, Native Son remains his greatest achievement. In 1963 (three years after Wright’s sudden death in a Paris hospital), the acclaimed cultural historian Irving Howe summed up, perhaps for all time, the epochal significance of the novel even as he criticized several of its aspects. “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever,” Howe declared. “It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.”
ARNOLD RAMPERSAD
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
BOOK ONE
FEAR
Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!
An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman’s voice sang out impatiently:
“Bigger, shut that thing off!”
A surly grunt sounded above the tinny ring