![]() ![]() There are seven other restorations in this definitive edition. (The BOMC did buy it and, later, Black Boy as well.) These pages, which include an account of masturbation in a movie theater and a discussion of interracial sex, tend to minimize whatever sympathy the reader feels for Bigger at this early point in the novel. Not far past the opening scene are the three-and-a-half pages that Wright's publishers, Harper & Brothers, suggested he excise so Native Son would be more seriously considered for adoption by the Book-of-the-Mouth Club. Here he is, with a name to chew hard on, Bigger Thomas.Īnd Bigger restored. This new edition does not include the Dorothy Canfield Fisher introduction, which helped to prepare readers for the shock awaiting them at the novel's opening now there is no ushering in, no cushion to soften the impact of that first, allegorical scene when Bigger awakens and flattens a big black rat with a skillet. ![]() WHEN Native Son, Richard Wright's most famous novel, was published in March 1940, reviewer Peter Monroe Jack wrote that he believed the book could just as well have been called "the Negro American tragedy" because of its rough comparison to Dreiser's novel - though Jack noted that Wright's "injustice is a racial, not merely a social, one." More than a half-century later, Native Son, now republished with four other works by Wright in a new, two-volume Library of America edition, remains a powerfully blunt novel. ![]()
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