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After its publication by Harper and Brothers on March 1, 1940, Richard Wright's Native Son became the first novel by an African-American released to the Book-of-the-Month Club.1 Wright consented to the deletions that the Club insisted he make in order to render the novel suitable for association with their program, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher was chosen to write its first introduction. Fisher's status as both a recognizable figure in the literary community and as a social activist and pioneer of adult education helped situate Native Son for its first readers as a sociological text, concerned with depicting the plight of black men and women in America. In his essay, "How Native Son Was Born," influential Wright scholar Keneth Kinnamon captures and reproduces the minor and dismissive critical response to Fisher's original introduction, arguing that while the liberal politics and sentiment of her commentary make it "innocent, if vapid," its major argumentative flaw is "offering two opposed interpretations of Bigger" (123). Fisher indeed identifies both an "environmental determinism" in the novel, prompting her to compare Bigger Thomas to a laboratory rat in a passage full of social scientific language, as well as the "spiritual sickness" of the "Dostoeivski subject" (qtd. in Kinnamon 123). By Kinnamon's account, the "environmental determinism" characteristic of naturalist fiction cannot coexist with existentialism and the search for authentic self-identity. Their incompatibility hinges on divided claims about the act of judgment involved in reading: the actions of a character are either seen as determined by the social and biological drives they helplessly follow, or as a triumphant form of individual self-determination. From this initial moment in Native Son's reception, competing claims about the novel's literary-historical status have thus implicitly carried with them competing political values.
In the seventy years since, this division of generic and political values has largely structured the reception of Native Son. For critics like Alfred Kazin, Robert Bone, and Edward Margolies, the "center of Richard Wright's art" is the "impulse to protest," making Bigger an exemplary victim of reprehensible social conditions and Native Son a seminal case study of literary naturalism (Bone 157). After James Baldwin's treatment of Wright in such essays as "Everybody's Protest Novel" and "Many Thousands Gone," however, a camp of existentialist critics reacted to a...