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The publication of Richard Wright's Native Son, in 1 940, created praise, disgust, awe, fascination, anger, and caution in the United States, for it allowed the American literary and reading public to overtly know, perhaps for the first time, the anger, shame, frustration, bitterness, and potential violence lodged in the African American psyche. Irving Howe argues "[t]he day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever" (256). The novel reconfigured the conversation about African Americans and African American literature, shifting the focus from the African American cultural emphasis of the Harlem Renaissance and the influential 1920s and 1930s American cultural anthropology to the social, to the practices and consequences of institutionalized racism.1 Native Son became the first novel by an African American selected by the Book-of-the Month Club. Because of the novel's focus on social issues, reviewers and critics immediately compared Wright to Dreiser, Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, and Dickens.2
In the last sixty-nine years, Native Son has become an over-determined text, inviting multiple readings. It has generated thousands of pages, as literary critics and scholars alike discuss its violence (Robert Felgar's "The Violence of the Beast"), its craft and style (Harold Bloom's 1987 introduction to Richard Wright), its treatment of women (Maria K. Mootry 's "Bitches, Whores, and Women Haters"; Sherley Anne Williams's "Papa Dick and Sister- Woman"; and Sylvia H. Keady's "Richard Wright's Women Characters and Inequality"), its failure to represent the black middle-class individual and to engage African American music and folklore (James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel"; Ralph Ellison's "Richard Wright's Blues"), and its naturalist and Marxist influences (Irving Howe's "Black Boys and Native Sons"; Dan McCall's The Example of Richard Wright; and Robert Bone's The Negro Novel in America). Yet many of these readings construct Native 5O«'s main protagonist, Bigger Thomas, as a victim, without much agency or subjectivity, to be pitied, embarrassed by, or ashamed of. Because they cannot find any value in societal murder/killing, and rightfully so, they bring this view to the text, totally ignoring how murder/killing functions literarily and subjectively in the text. Very few critics focus on Bigger's subjectivity.3
In "How 'Bigger' Was Born," Wright singles out the social milieu/the oppressive economic and social conditions in which Bigger is socialized, drawing him as a composite of several social...