significance was widely recognized then. Whilerightly decrying it for melodramatic and propagandistic excesses, one critic after another admitted these were more than outweighed by its sheer power. The book was frequently compared to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment . And, again, to Theodore Dreiser: “ Native Son does for the Negro,” wrote Clifton Fadiman in the New Yorker, what Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy did a decade and a half ago for the bewildered, inarticulate American white. The two books are similar in theme, in technique, in their almost paralyzing effect on the reader, and in the large, brooding humanity, quite remote from special pleading, that informs them both.”
It takes nothing from its significance as social document to report that Wright’s book is, as a reading experience, thoroughly engrossing—especially if you go for blood, gore, decapitations, authentic dialect, flight and capture. Compare it to Dostoyevsky and Dreiser all you like, but Native Son is, for much of the 396 pages of one of its early Modern Library editions, a real thriller.
“Brrrrrriiiiiiiing! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room,” the book opens, and from that to the final working-out of Bigger’s relationship to himself, his lawyer and his crime, the book simply won’t be put down. True, as in other thrillers a notch or two down from Olympian literary heights, you sometimes feel manipulated. And all those pages in the close company of psychopathic murderer Bigger Thomas, as he stalks the streets of Chicago killing and running, desperate and fearful, can scarcely be termed enjoyable. Still, Native Son is one classic you never feel you’re dutifully slogging through.
For all the antiquity of its slang, for all its dated cast of characters—the red-baiting police chief, the “Front Page” era reporters, the left-wing dogooder, the aristocratic racist—you come away feeling immersed in a world as current as the morning paper. True, the years have wrought changes, from Brown vs. Board of Education and Black Power to Martin Luther King, Jr. and an evergrowing black middle class. Yet Native Son remains sadly applicable to at least one slice of black experience—and to white understanding of it. Yes, it’s hard to imagine any novelist creating the likes of Bigger Thomastoday; but that’s because the novelistic challenge Wright tackled first has been taken up by many other writers since, and not because of any dearth of truelife models from which to draw. Bigger Thomas is alive and running scared in the run-down black ghettos of every American city. And just as persistent are the conditions which spawned him.
Richard Wright never “defends” Bigger, never justifies his crime. He explains it, but does not explain it away; he says, in effect, “What do you expect?” Subject an entire race first to slavery and then to economic colonialism, pack them together under desperate conditions, deprive them of their human dignity, and Bigger Thomas is the more-than-occasional result: As stimulus breeds response, and oppression breeds crime, so do three centuries of racism breed Bigger Thomas.
Essay
____________
By Michel de Montaigne
First appeared in 1580
“This is the only book in the world of its kind, and its plan is both wild and extravagant,” wrote Michel de Montaigne of his Essays .
What he meant was, first, that he was himself their subject. And second, that instead of following a line of lockstep logic to some one end, he chose instead to let his thoughts float freely where they wished, however hesitant or contradictory the results might be.
He begins one essay, for example, by distinguishing between goodness and virtue, the first being natural and effortless, the second difficult to achieve; he comments on how—even in his day!—the words goodness and innocence had taken on a tinge of contempt; he notes an Italian’s assessment of the soldierly qualities of the French, Spanish,
It takes nothing from its significance as social document to report that Wright’s book is, as a reading experience, thoroughly engrossing—especially if you go for blood, gore, decapitations, authentic dialect, flight and capture. Compare it to Dostoyevsky and Dreiser all you like, but Native Son is, for much of the 396 pages of one of its early Modern Library editions, a real thriller.
“Brrrrrriiiiiiiing! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room,” the book opens, and from that to the final working-out of Bigger’s relationship to himself, his lawyer and his crime, the book simply won’t be put down. True, as in other thrillers a notch or two down from Olympian literary heights, you sometimes feel manipulated. And all those pages in the close company of psychopathic murderer Bigger Thomas, as he stalks the streets of Chicago killing and running, desperate and fearful, can scarcely be termed enjoyable. Still, Native Son is one classic you never feel you’re dutifully slogging through.
For all the antiquity of its slang, for all its dated cast of characters—the red-baiting police chief, the “Front Page” era reporters, the left-wing dogooder, the aristocratic racist—you come away feeling immersed in a world as current as the morning paper. True, the years have wrought changes, from Brown vs. Board of Education and Black Power to Martin Luther King, Jr. and an evergrowing black middle class. Yet Native Son remains sadly applicable to at least one slice of black experience—and to white understanding of it. Yes, it’s hard to imagine any novelist creating the likes of Bigger Thomastoday; but that’s because the novelistic challenge Wright tackled first has been taken up by many other writers since, and not because of any dearth of truelife models from which to draw. Bigger Thomas is alive and running scared in the run-down black ghettos of every American city. And just as persistent are the conditions which spawned him.
Richard Wright never “defends” Bigger, never justifies his crime. He explains it, but does not explain it away; he says, in effect, “What do you expect?” Subject an entire race first to slavery and then to economic colonialism, pack them together under desperate conditions, deprive them of their human dignity, and Bigger Thomas is the more-than-occasional result: As stimulus breeds response, and oppression breeds crime, so do three centuries of racism breed Bigger Thomas.
Essay
____________
By Michel de Montaigne
First appeared in 1580
“This is the only book in the world of its kind, and its plan is both wild and extravagant,” wrote Michel de Montaigne of his Essays .
What he meant was, first, that he was himself their subject. And second, that instead of following a line of lockstep logic to some one end, he chose instead to let his thoughts float freely where they wished, however hesitant or contradictory the results might be.
He begins one essay, for example, by distinguishing between goodness and virtue, the first being natural and effortless, the second difficult to achieve; he comments on how—even in his day!—the words goodness and innocence had taken on a tinge of contempt; he notes an Italian’s assessment of the soldierly qualities of the French, Spanish,
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