As Arnold Rampersad gently puts it in his introduction to my edition, 'the appearance of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, with its dazzling modernist techniques… also tended to make Native Son seem crude in comparison.'īut I found a cheap copy and decided to eat my Wheaties. It has a reputation for being suffocating, originating with the writers who would succeed Wright-like James Baldwin, who would alienate his hero, in the way young writers do, with the career-defining essay 'Everybody's Protest Novel,' a genre in which he categorized Native Son, comparing it to the 'very bad novel' Uncle Tom's Cabin: 'The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and cannot be transcended.'Ĭoming to this reaction second-hand, I unfairly lumped in Native Son with the hectoring early-20th-century American social realism I had to drag my way through in college like Norris and Dreiser, in which anthropomorphized social issues exclaim metaphors to each other. And it's probably why I avoided it for so long, despite being a classic novel of Chicago. It's the right word to describe the atmosphere of the book. Richard Wright’s Native Son Returns to Chicago.Video: Watch the Court Theatre Rehearse Native Son.As Kelley tells Sam Worley in this month's issue of Chicago, it's a favorite of hers, in part because it echoes her feelings about the place she grew up, close to the book's terrain: 'When I was a little girl in that neighborhood, I can't tell you how suffocated I felt.'

Kelley, at Court Theatre in collaboration with American Blues Theater. Urn:oclc:748294318 Republisher_date 20120710090913 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120710020608 Scanner night was the world premiere of Native Son, an adaptation of Richard Wright's book by Bronzville native Nambi E. Urn:lcp:nativesonperenni00rich:epub:ae737eae-6dc5-46d8-9013-8634723ab5a4 Extramarc The Indiana University Catalog Foldoutcount 0 Identifier nativesonperenni00rich Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6543wf41 Isbn 006083756XĤ0004862 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary OL9237480M Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 16:30:21 Asin 006083756X Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA179601 Boxid_2 CH114001 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York DonorĪlibris Edition 1st Perennial Classics ed.

Native son by richard wright