![]() When he lands a job working for a wealthy White family, he’s intimidated by their kindness-and certainly doesn’t know how to respond to their rebellious daughter’s insistence that they be friends, comrades in the struggle. He wants to lash out by committing a crime, but he doesn’t quite know how to go about it. Native Son’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is angry in a lumbering, unfocused way. ![]() ![]() He took a place at the forefront of a civil rights struggle whose battles would be fought not just in the streets, but, in time, in schools and libraries. Brilliant and largely self-taught, radicalized, he established himself as the voice of an African American community no longer patient, no longer willing to endure daily indignities, humiliations, and injustices. Wright had come up to Chicago from the Deep South during the Great Migration. ![]() ![]() When Richard Wright’s first novel, Native Son, was published in 1940, American culture “was forever changed.” So wrote literary and cultural historian Irving Howe, signaling that something new had come forth: a raw story that expressed the frustration and rage of Blacks who had suffered long, too long, under Jim Crow and the oppressive restrictions of racism. ![]()
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