It could have been for assault or petty larceny by chance, it was for murder and rape. Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. Because as much as I found much of Native Son alarming, horrific and difficult to read due to the nature of its content, it too was an intense nail-biting book that I couldn’t put down, however much I wanted to.Ī book that deals with issues that are devastatingly still relevant and rife and prevalent today – from racism, to police brutality to how Black bodies are exploited, even in death – it’s a story that not only still hangs heavily on my mind, long after I finished reading it but it too is a book that I think absolutely everyone should read. One of the biggest surprises for me reading Native Son was both how contemporary it felt, and how utterly unputdownable it was. RELATED: A literary stay at The Lake District's Another Place, The Lake Suffice it to say, that a crime is committed – albeit and accidental one, in a sense, and what follows is a nail-biting narrative as both the crime and the consequences spiral out of control. Soon after the story starts, Bigger finds work as a chauffeur for the Dalton’s – a local, elite family, who are active in their dedication to helping the black community by hiring them as household staff.įrom the very beginning of the novel, I read with a great sense of trepidation and doom – for while I didn’t know what exactly was to come (having somehow avoided the blurb entirely) I knew that it wouldn’t be good. Native Son tells the story of impoverished twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas who lives in a poor area on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930’s. Published over eighty years ago to both enduring and critical responses from many other African-American writers, including – perhaps most famously – James Baldwin’s Notes on a Native Son.

Much like Cole’s other recommendations, there’s no doubt about it that Native Son is a sobering read.

And so it was that when I was thumbing through the many unread tomes in my apartment the other day, I quickly landed on Richard Wright’s most famous novel, and settled down to read it, not really knowing what I was in for. I’ve gone on to read – and love – a number of the books Cole recommended me, including the powerful and poignant Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. The first time I remember hearing about the book Native Son by Richard Wright was when Cole Brown – a previous guest on my podcast – chose it as one of his desert island books.

Native son written by richard wright