Native Son

Native Son is a novel by the American writer Richard Wright, published in 1940. It covers a few weeks in the life of a young black man in Chicago.

Bigger Thomas lives with his mother, his brother and his sister in a single room in a poor district of the city's South Side. He is offered a job as a chauffeur by the Daltons, a wealthy white family who own the building his family rents, and it is an offer he cannot refuse and does not want. The novel is explicit that his fear is not irrational: Bigger has grown up in a city that has already decided what he is, and the room he is given at the Daltons' house is the first privacy he has ever had. His first evening in the job ends in a death and a lie, and from then on he is trying to stay ahead of what he has done. The second half of the book belongs to the manhunt and then to Boris Max, the lawyer who argues at Bigger's trial that his client's crime was manufactured by the society that produced him.

The last word is given to the courtroom, where Bigger's fate is argued over by people who have never lived his life.