Native Son

De: Richard Wright

Narrado por: Peter Francis James

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels

“If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son.” – Henry Louis Gates Jr.

"The most powerful American novel to appear since The Grapes of Wrath." —The New Yorker

When it was first published in 1940, Native Son established Richard Wright as a literary star. In the decades since, Wright's masterpiece—hailed by Newsweek as "a novel of tremendous power and beauty"—has become a revered classic that remains as timely and relevant today as when it first appeared.

Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Native Son is the story of Bigger Thomas, a young Black man caught in a downward spiral after killing a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Written with the distinctive rhythm of a modern crime story, this formidable work is both a condemnation of social injustice and an unsparing portrait of the Black experience in America, revealing the tragic effect of poverty, racism, and hopelessness on the human spirit. "I wrote Native Son to show what manner of men and women our 'society of the majority' breeds, and my aim was to depict a character in terms of the living tissue and texture of daily consciousness," Wright explained.

Pay attention to this book

If the people of America had paid true attention to this book when it was published 75 years ago (many read it - a best seller) - I believe we would not have the ongoing human blights of racism, gender discrimination and increasingly gross economic division. It is beautifully narrated and exquisitely written. It is prophetic. Are we ready to listen, read, and pay attention in 2015?

Listen to this while you read Erasure

Try this for a great combo: Listen to Native Son as an audio book while simultaneously reading Percival Everett’s Erasure. Even though the books are set fifty years apart, and some things have changed profoundly in this country in the intervening years in terms of race relations, I was astounded at how much has not changed. The protagonists of the two books are both black men in America. Native Son’s Bigger Thomas is an uneducated, poor, thuggish young man trying to get by in the segregated Chicago of the 1940s. Erasure’s protagonist, Monk Ellison, (note to self: re-read Ellison’s Invisible Man next) is a current-day university professor from a wealthy family that gave him every advantage imaginable. Despite these surface differences, both men’s lives are severely limited by the strictures and expectations placed on them by their respective time periods. And although Native Son was overlong and preachy, I found that the injustices depicted in the book echoed in Erasure, as they do in the everyday lives of many Black Americans. African American males still have much higher rates of unemployment than any other group of Americans—worse even than the employment rate of white felons. Black males in America are less likely to graduate from high school, more likely to be arrested, and more likely to go to prison. Native Son lays these and other injustices bare . . . if only we could say we had erased these problems in the years since it was written.

read (listen to) this book

I feel weak and sad. Powerful and well written and performed. I'll be thinking about Bigger for a long time

Great story

Great story. I was very excited about listening every day. I would highly recommend this book.

The story

This story was very compelling story, and sucked the reader in and displayed the unfortunate truth that many black men to this day feel plagued by.