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How “Bigger” Was Born. The Story of Native Son, one of the most significant novels of our time, and how it came to be written. [Signed by Richard Wright]
How “Bigger” Was Born. The Story of Native Son, one of the most significant novels of our time, and how it came to be written. [Signed by Richard Wright]

How “Bigger” Was Born. The Story of Native Son, one of the most significant novels of our time, and how it came to be written. [Signed by Richard Wright]

Autographed by the Author


Autographed by Richard Wright on the dedication page; published in the same year as Wright’s magnum opus Native Son which would become an instant bestseller and catapult Wright to overnight fame. The novel’s chief character, Bigger Thomas, was a union, in part, of many “Bigger Thomases” Richard Wright would encounter before his escape from the South, as recounted in Black Boy, his autobiography. These were Southern black men, who rebelliously violated Jim Crow laws, but paid a terrible price under white oppression and racial violence. Bigger Thomas “is unlike any protagonist ever to have appeared in African American literature. Before Bigger Thomas, black heroes and heroines were generally virtuous, polite, upright, intelligent, sensitive, and knowledgeable. Bigger Thomas is crude, barely literate, unclean, untrustworthy, and a murderer. [his behavior] seems driven by a fear of whites that was the legacy of slavery. Every act he performs has its roots in dread.”¹ Wright wrote of his fear of own whites extensively in Black Boy.


Description: How “Bigger” Was Born. The Story of Native Son, one of the most significant novels of our time, and how it came to be written. [Signed by Richard Wright]

New York: Harper & Brothers, (1940). 39, [1 (blank)]pp. First Edition. Signed. Stiff yellow wraps, modestly decorated; toned and lightly soiled, tiny chips; very good.

[3727532]

Note. 1. Andrews, Foster, Harris, Oxford Companion to African American Literature.


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