Native Son: Richard Wright - Softcover

Wright, Richard

4.03 out of 5 stars

100,341 ratings by Goodreads

9780099282938: Native Son: Richard Wright

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099282933 ISBN 13: 9780099282938

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2000

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Discover Richard Wright’s brutal and gripping masterpiece.

'The most important and celebrated novel of Negro life to have appeared in America' James Baldwin

Gripping and furious, Native Son follows Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. Unwittingly involved in a wealthy woman's death, he is hunted relentlessly, baited by prejudiced officials, charged with murder and driven to acknowledge a strange pride in his crime. Native Son shocked readers on its first publication in 1940 and went on to make Richard Wright the first bestselling black writer in America.

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Review

"Before he was 40, Wright dominated literary America, publishing four books in seven years, each a triumph in its genre. His first novel, Native Son (1940), sold at the rate of 2,000 copies a day, making Wright the first best-selling black writer in the country's history. Black Boy (1945), his memoir of his Southern childhood, was a bigger success, selling more than a half-million copies." (New York Times)

"Richard Wright's Native Son is, in addition to being a masterpiece, a Great American Novel" (David Mamet Guardian)

"Unsettling urban violence from the man who was Mosley's inspiration" (The Times)

"Native Son is the story of a young black man who kills two white women; and it was the first book - published in 1940 - to suggest that black Americans could actually get angry. When it came out, it beat The Grapes of Wrath in the best-seller lists" (Independent)