Native Son Study Guide

Richard Wright was born in rural Mississippi, lived for a time near Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, and was raised mostly by female relatives in his extended family. His father left the family when Wright was a child, and his mother worked a series of menial jobs before suffering strokes between 1918 and 1920, requiring medical care for the rest of her life. Having performed well academically until he was forced, in high school, to drop out and begin working, Wright relocated, in 1927, to Chicago—a city that would allow Wright to develop as a writer and thinker, and in which his novel Native Son was based. One of Wright’s jobs in Chicago was mail sorter at the Post Office. As a young man, Wright read widely in modern English and American literature, as well as translated literature from continental Europe. Wright joined, for a time, the Communist Party in Chicago, and after writing a first novel (Lawd Today, eventually published in 1963), he moved to New York City in 1937 and wrote, in 1938 and 1940, respectively, the short-story collection Uncle Tom’s Children and the novel Native Son, which launched his career. Wright’s Black Boy, a somewhat fictionalized tale of his young life, was released in 1945 and added to his fame. Wright moved to Paris in 1946, and lived there, primarily, until his death in 1960. Wright was an inspiration for other African-American writers, including Ralph Ellison (author of Invisible Man) and James Baldwin; the latter would go on to critique Wright’s work severely, but with the acknowledgment of its influence on his own.

Wright’s most famous works—Native Son and Black Boy—each deal with the effects of a historical event often called the Great Migration, in which million of African Americans left the oppressive political and social conditions of the South and moved northward, to cities like Chicago and Detroit, in the Midwest, and New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, on the East Coast. Although Bigger, the protagonist of Native Son, finds that Chicago lacks the overt racism of Mississippi (where Bigger claims to have family, and where Wright himself was born), Bigger also notices a good deal of subtler racism in the city: zones where only whites or blacks are expected to live; “charities” that serve, mostly, to maintain conditions for African Americans, rather than to help them to make money and live on equal terms with whites. Wright wrote during a time of renewed political agitation against discriminatory laws in the South and across the country—the major civil rights push of the first part of the 20th-century in the US—that resulted, in 1964, in the signing of the Civil Rights Act, and a great deal of federal involvement in the political affairs of the South (most notably regarding the right of African Americans to vote). The frustrations exhibited by Bigger and other characters in Wright’s fiction stem from the unresolved racial conflicts of 1930s and 1940s America.

Wright read a great deal of 19th- and 20th-century literature, in addition to moral and political philosophy, and his books are infused with the ideas of the great thinkers and fiction writers of those centuries. Native Son consists of a story—a crime and its punishment—not unrelated to Dostoevsky’s great 19th-century novel Crime and Punishment, which details the life of a down-and-out man named Raskolnikov, who, like Bigger, is consumed by anger, confusion, and a deep sadness about contemporary life. Wright’s works also reflect an interest in the ideas of “existentialism,” a complex philosophical tradition best exemplified in literature by the plays and texts of Jean-Paul Sartre, with whose ideas Wright was to become more familiar on Wright’s move to Paris after the Second World War. The social novels of the 19th century, including those of Emile Zola, in France, and of Charles Dickens, in England, also have a clear influence on Native Son and its focus on telling a story of difficult urban life in 1930s Chicago. Wright also wrote in a tradition of modern African-American literature to which he contributed greatly, especially after the explosion of literary activity occurring in Harlem in the early part of the 20th century, termed the “Harlem Renaissance.” Wright was not from New York City, and his work appeared after the major poems of (as one example) Langston Hughes, but Wright nevertheless carried on a tradition of social commentary that writers of the Harlem Renaissance established. The works of James Baldwin (Go Tell It On the Mountain; The Fire Next Time; Another Country) and of Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man) also derive, in part, from Wright’s work, if only in the way their work contrasts and opposes Wright's in both style and politics. Both Baldwin’s and Ellison’s writings are more lyrical, less blunt in their realism than Wright’s. But both Baldwin and Ellison considered Wright an important influence.