![]() Given both the nature and the brutality of certain of its scenes, we are struck by the details of the current controversy over a novel reported in the New York Times. Its title arises frequently, amid some prestigious company, in discussions concerning school reading lists. Native Son is, undeniably, a novel of violence. Today, fifty years after Harper and Brothers released the novel that was to become a best-seller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a number of the issues raised, the objections it drew, and the dark predictions it proffered have a great deal of relevance both in literary and in societal terms. To these forces, Wright’s novel is a self-professed note of warning: an apocalyptic prediction of the horror that horror engenders. To a society capable of Jim Crow laws, to an elaborate social system that showed itself more adept at creating and then destroying monsters than at preventing their existence. ![]() ![]() To a society capable of Jim Crow laws, to an elaborate social system that showed itself more adept at creating and then destroying monsters than at preventing their existence.īut in addition to these two levels of meaning, as the author himself will allude to in the introductory piece, “How Bigger was Born,” the novel itself is meant to sound an alarm. The novel itself is meant to sound an alarm. ![]()
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