Native Son

Fascinating. I finished this book minutes before Barack Obama gave his nomination acceptance speech. What a different world today than it was when Wright wrote it. That's not to say the creation of Bigger Thomas isn't still happening around the country today, but advancements have happened and are worth celebrating.

I'm not in love with Wright's writing style. I read Black Boy in college and felt like it suffered from the same problems: overly preachy and wordy, with long drawn out speeches and long drawn out (and repetitive) descriptions of how characters are feeling. I felt like he easily could have knocked 100 pages off this thing and still been just as effective--if not more so!

Still, passages of the novel have an intensity hard to match. At the end of Book I, when Bigger kills for the first time, I was left breathless--with horror and with shock. There's more to go from there, and Wright steadily and monotonously beats his message drum into the text, but in that savagery--and in a few scenes later on--he gets into the heart of the issue more than pages of philosophizing does. One more classic down, and though not one I would probably teach in class, one I'm glad to have read. Of course, click to buy.