Native Son is a novel set in Chicago in the 1930s. Its central figure is Bigger Thomas, a young Black man from a crowded South Side apartment who takes a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family. Anxious, angry and hemmed in by the limits placed on his life, he is drawn into a chain of events that quickly spins beyond his control. The book follows the fear, pursuit and legal reckoning that result, and it examines how poverty, segregation and prejudice shape a person's choices and how others see him. Powerful and disturbing, it was a landmark of American fiction and still prompts debate about race and responsibility.
Quotes
The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts.
I sensed, too, that the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity-profit machine.
But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.
I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I every wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.