Native Son (Questions)

Native Son (Questions) 1 Wright writes of Bigger Thomas: “these were the rhythms of his life; indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger” … Does Wright intend us to relate to Bigger as a human being – or has he deliberately made him an embodiment of oppressive social and political forces? Is there anything admirable about Bigger? Does he change by the end of the book? 2 James Baldwin, an early protégé of Wright’s, later attacked the older writer for his self-righteousness and reliance on stereo-types… In his famous essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” Baldwin compared Bigger to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, and dismissed Native Son as “protest” fiction. Do you agree? 3 When Bigger stands confronted by his family in jail, he thinks… they ought to be glad he was a murderer; “had he not taken on himself the crime of being black?” Talk about Bigger as a victim and sacrificial figure. If Wright wanted us to pity Bigger, why did he portray him as so brutal? 4 How dated does this book seem in its depiction of racial hatred and guilt? Have we as a society moved beyond the rage and hostility that Wright depicts between blacks and whites? Or are we still living in a culture that could produce a figure like Bigger Thomas? https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/719-native-son-wright?start=3 Native Son (About the Author) Author: Richard Wright Born: September 4, 1908 Where: near Natchez, MS Education: Smith-Robertson Junior High, Jackson MS Died: November 28, 1960 Where: Paris, France Richard Wright was the first 20th century African-American writer to command both critical acclaim and popular success. Born on a plantation outside of Roxie, MS, he moved to New York to make his way as a professional writer. In 1938 he published Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of four short novels about the violent persecution of black men in the South. Harper and Brothers published Native Son two years later to immediate acclaim and phenomenal sales. Black Boy was more successful when it appeared in 1945, selling more than 500,000 copies its first year. Despite his success, Wright continued to feel stifled by racial prejudice. Convinced he could find greater freedom abroad, he moved to Paris with his wife, an American woman of Polish-Jewish descent, and their young daughter. He quickly made contact with leading French existentialists and began reading deeply in the works of Sartre, Camus and Heidegger. In the fiction he composed in France, Wright tried to view racial issues from an existentialist perspective. When he died suddenly of a heart attack in Paris in 1960, Wright was considered a marginal figure, …whose works had lost favor with a younger generation of African- American intellectuals. The emergence of the black power movement in the 1960s sparked a major reassessment of Wright as both an innovative prose stylist and a militant social critic. Today Richard Wright is recognized as one of the great American writers of the 20th Century. (from the publisher) https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/719-native-son-wright?start=1 Native Son (Book Reviews) The story is a powerful one and it alone will force the Negro issue to our attention. Certainly, Native Son declares Richard Wright’s importance, not merely as the best Negro writer but as an American author as distinctive as any of those now writing. Peter Munro Jack – The New York Times Book Review (1940) The 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 of American readers of what it means to live in a multi-racial society in which power splits along racial lines. Jack Miles – Los Angeles Times https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/13-fiction/719-native-son?start=2 Native Son (Enhancement) Influences: Wright based aspects of the novel on the 1938 arrest and trial of Robert Nixon, executed in 1939 following a series of "brick bat murders" in Los Angeles and Chicago. Native Son was the original title of Chicago writer Nelson Algren's first novel, Somebody in Boots, based on a piece of doggerel about the first Texan. Algren and Wright had met at Chicago's John Reed Club circa 1933 and later worked together at the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago. According to Bettina Drew's 1989 biography Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, he bequeathed the title "Native Son" to Wright. Literary significance and criticism: Wright's protest novel was an immediate best- seller; it sold 250,000 hardcover copies within three weeks of its publication by the Book-of-the-Month Club on March 1, 1940. It was 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 also made Wright the wealthiest Black writer of his time and established him as a spokesperson for African American issues, and the "father of Black American literature." As Irving Howe said in his 1963 essay "Black Boys and Native Sons": "The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, 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." The novel's treatment of Bigger and his motivations is an example of literary naturalism. The book also received criticism from some of Wright's fellow African American writers. James Baldwin's 1948 essay, Everybody's Protest Novel, dismissed Native Son as protest fiction, as well as limited in its understanding of human character and in artistic value. The essay was collected with nine others in Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son (1955). In 1991, Native Son was published for the first time in its entirety by the Library of America, together with an introduction, a chronology, and notes by Arnold Rampersad, a well-regarded scholar of African American literary works. This edition also contains Richard Wright's 1940 essay "How 'Bigger' Was Born." The original edition had a masturbation scene removed at the request of the Book-of- the-Month club. The novel has endured a series of challenges in public high schools and libraries all over the United States. Many of these challenges focus on the book's being "sexually graphic," "unnecessarily violent," and "profane." Despite complaints from parents, many schools have successfully fought to keep Wright's work in the classroom. Some teachers believe the themes in Native Son and other challenged books "foster dialogue and discussion in the classroom "and "guide students into the reality of the complex adult and social world." Native Son is number 27 on Radcliffe's Rival 100 Best Novels List. The book is number 71 on the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000. The Modern Library placed it number 20 on its list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century. Time Magazine also included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Influence of Communism on Native Son: Wright was affiliated with the Communist Party of the United States both prior to and following his publishing of Native Son. The Communist ideas in Native Son are evident as Wright draws a parallel between the Scottsboro boys case and Bigger Thomas' case. One parallel is the court scene in Native Son, in which Max calls the "hate and impatience" of "the mob congregated upon the streets beyond the window" (Wright, p. 386) and the "mob who surrounded the Scottsboro jail with rope and kerosene" after the Scottsboro boys' initial conviction. (Maxwell, page 132) Critics attacked Max's final speech in the courtroom, claiming that it was an irrelevant elaboration on Wright's own Communist beliefs and unrelated to Bigger's case. There are many different interpretations concerning which group was the intended target of Max's speech. James Baldwin, a renowned critic of Wright's, presented his own interpretation of Max's final speech in Notes by a Native Son; Baldwin says Max's speech is "addressed to those among us of good will and it seems to say that, though there are whites and blacks among us who hate each other, we will not; there are those who are betrayed by greed, by guilt, by blood, by blood lust, but not we; we will set our faces against them and join hands and walk together into that dazzling future when there will be no white or black" (Baldwin, p. 47). However, other critics, such as Siegel, have argued that the original text in Native Son does not imply "the dazzling future when there will be no white or black". Thus, the argument that Max's final speech is a Communist promotion is not supported by the texts in the novel (Kinnamon 96). Max referred to Bigger as a part of the working class in his closing statement. Furthermore, in 1938, Wright also advocated the image of African Americans as members of the working class in his article in the New York Amsterdam News: "I have found in the Negro worker the real symbol of the working class in America." (Foley 190) Thus, Wright's depiction of and belief in the figure of African American workers and his depiction of Bigger Thomas as a worker showed evidence of Communist influence on Native Son.

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