Critical Insights: Native Son

---

---

Native Son deftly portrayed systemic causes for the actions of its protagonist, 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, when he accidentally kills a white woman. Wright’s perceptive characterization and narrative skill draw readers into a world where Bigger could not have escaped this tragic fate, where he has been formed by a society that has told him since birth exactly who he is.

This new addition to the Critical Insights series gives readers an entry point into the study this major literary and social text. Essays position Native Son in both a historical and a modern context, analyzing the novel’s contemporary literary and cultural landscape, chronicling its critical reception, and comparing it to other works of art illuminate the past, while essays that employ modern critical lenses speak to Native Son’s current relevance and beyond.

Themes of particular interest to Wright are examined in this volume, including existentialism, Marxism, and phenomenology. The story’s themes and early critical response are examined through historical and modern contexts. Essays also explore the novel’s film adaptations, and the novel is compared and contrasted against additional relevant works by Wright.

In the introductory essay, volume editor Nicolas Tredell summarizes the essays contained in this volume and provides guidance for readers in pinpointing particular topics of interest.

The four Critical Context essays featured in this volume include:

• “He examined the map again”: Richard Wright’s Macroscopic Analysis of Chicago in Native Son
• Richard Wright and Bigger Thomas Among the Natives: The Early Reception of Native Son
• Against Naturalism! Crude Psychology in Native Son
• Living Better, Not Bitter: Whitehead Reconfigures the Bigger Thomas Experiment

Following these four Critical Context essays is the Critical Readings section of this book, which contains the following essays:

• Mrs. Thomas and Vera: Still Haunting Richard Wright’s Creative Legacy
• The Women Who Shaped Native Son
• From Native Son to Notes of a Native Son: The Fraught Relationship Between Richard Wright and James Baldwin
• Battling Over Bigger: Wright, James Baldwin, and Native Son
• “The reality of the room fell from him”: The Phenomenologies of Black Masculinity from Native Son to “Island of Hallucination”
• Comrades and Loners: Marxism and Existentialism in Native Son and The Outsider
• Bigger Thomas and the Butterfly: Bridging the “Biographical Enigma” Between Native Son and Richard Wright’s Late Haiku
• Sympathy for the Rat: Reflections on Wright’s Critical Critters: From Native Son to Wright’s Haiku
• Early and Later Reviews of the 1951 Film of Richard Wright’s Native Son
• Native Son Movies—Gross Failures All

Each essay in Critical Insights: Native Son includes a list of Works Cited and detailed endnotes. In the final section, Resources, provides a list of Additional Works for those who wish to further explore this topic followed by a Bibliography. Finally, this section closes with an About the Editor section, Contributors, and a detailed Index.

The Critical Insights Series distills the best of both classic and current literary criticism of the world’s most studied literature. Edited and written by some of academia’s most distinguished literary scholars, Critical Insights: Native Son provides authoritative, in-depth scholarship that students and researchers will rely on for years. This volume is destined to become a valuable purchase for all.

---

View a Full List of Literature Titles