Genre: Classics
Length: 544 pages
Audiobook Length: 17 hours and 47 minutes
First Published: 1940
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Publisher’s Description
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.
Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright’s powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
Quotes from Native Son
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em…
Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.
Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.
Movie Trailer for Native Son (2019)
About Richard Wright
Richard Wright was an American author known for writing about race relations in the United States. His works include Native Son, Black Boy, Uncle Tom’s Children, and The Outsider. Wright died in 1960 at the age of 52.
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