I don’t know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don’t know if the book I’m working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don’t care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody.
I feel that I’m lucky to be alive to write novels today, when the whole world is caught in the pangs of war and change. Early American writers, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne, complained bitterly about the bleakness and flatness of the American scene. But I think that if they were alive, they’d feel at home in modern America. True, we have no great church in America; our national traditions are still of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them; and we have no army that’s above the level of mercenary fighters; we have no group acceptable to the whole of our country upholding certain humane values; we have no rich symbols, no colorful rituals. We have only a money-grubbing, industrial civilization. But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart out national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.
RICHARD WRIGHT.
NEW YORK, MARCH 7, 1940.
Note on the Texts
This volume presents two works by Richard Wright: a novel, Native Son, and an essay on its writing. The text of Native Son is from the completed page proofs, and the text of the essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” is from its first pamphlet publication. This text of Native Son is the last version of the text that Wright prepared without external intervention. A great deal of material pertaining to the publication of these works, including typescripts, page proofs, and correspondence between Wright and his publishers, is contained in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Other significant materials are held in the Fales Collection of the New York University Library and the Firestone Library at Princeton University.
Wright sent an outline for Native Son to Harper and Brothers in February 1938, and delivered the final typescript to Aswell at Harper in June 1939. This copy was prepared by a typist working with Wright from a corrected second draft that included typed changes inserted with paste. This typescript, showing a copy-editor’s markings, is now at the Beinecke Library. The markings generally have to do with capitalization, hyphenation, typographical errors, and changing numerals to words. There are also a few cases where conjunctions have been added or deleted.
Two sets of page proofs for Native Son are known to exist. The first set, in the Fales Collection at New York University, contains markings in various hands, including Wright’s. Apparently this set was corrected by the Harper and Brothers editors and reviewed and approved by Wright. The second, and later, set (Beinecke Library, Zan W936 94C na) shows the earlier corrections now set in type. It is a bound set of page proofs that Harper and Brothers sent to the Book-of-the-Month Club in August 1939. The bound set was originally intended as a reviewer’s copy for the previously announced fall publication, but the interest expressed by the Book-of-the-Month Club caused the publication date to be delayed from month to month while the book club deliberated.
On August 22, 1939, Aswell wrote to Wright: “And incidentally the Book Club wants to know whether, if they do choose Native Son, you would be willing to make some changes in that scene early in the book where Bigger and his friends are sitting in the moving picture theatre. I think you will recognize the scene I mean and will understand why the Book Club finds it objectionable. They are not a particularly squeamish crowd, but that scene, after all, is a bit on the raw side. I daresay you could revise it in a way to suggest what happens rather than to tell it explicitly.”
This scene, as contained in the typescripts, the Fales Collection proofs, and the bound set of proofs, was drastically altered for the published text. Wright rewrote the entire scene, making only passing reference to a newsreel and describing at length a feature film, The Gay Woman. In so doing, he eliminated all mention of Mary Dalton (who is featured in the newsreel in the original scene) and all references to masturbation. This change also required him to revise other passages further on, including the prosecutor’s speech at Bigger’s trial. Other changes were also requested: toning down explicit sexual language, altering details of plot, and shortening the speeches of Bigger’s lawyer and the district attorney. A few paragraphs were added, and some changes may have been made to avoid resetting long stretches of type. On September 28, 1939, Aswell wrote to Wright: “I have looked over your revisions, and they seem to me to take care of everything essential. I want, however, to look them over once more just to make sure that we haven’t missed anything. As for the question of Bigger’s articulateness at the end, it is my recollection that only one person questioned this, and that most of them had not noticed it in reading the book and did not attach great importance to it when it was pointed out. My hunch is to let it stand as you have it. There is no news as yet, but there may be shortly.” Later, on January 11, 1940, Aswell wrote in a letter to Wright, “We’ve had a cable from London that Gollancz will bring out an English edition. In this connection, you will be interested to know that Gollancz turned it down flatly when they reviewed the first uncorrected proofs. After you made the changes for the Book Club, we sent Gollancz a revised set, and this apparently made them change their minds and they accepted it.”
By January 1940, the Book-of-the-Month Club had decided to accept the novel. The changes requested by the book club had previously been incorporated into a new set of proofs, which Wright reviewed in November 1939. Native Son, with an introduction by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, was published on March 1, 1940, by Harper and Brothers and was a dual-selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. All subsequent editions used this revised text. In July 1940, Wright sent Aswell a list of three corrections to be made in later printings. These were not incorporated into the plates until late 1941 or early 1942. All have to do with Chicago geography: “Adams Street” becomes “Seventh Street” at 65:4 in this volume; “northward” becomes “westward” at 173:16; and “HALSTEAD” (a street name) becomes “HALSTED” at 255:33.
Because major alterations were made in Native Son as a consequence of the book club’s intervention in the publication process, the text of Native Son presented in this volume is that of the bound page proofs, which were sent to Book-of-the-Month Club in August 1939, and which are now held at the Beinecke Library (Zan W936 94C na) at Yale University. The three corrections Wright sent to Aswell in 1940 have been incorporated into the text. All changes in wording that Wright made between August 1939 and the publication of the first edition in 1940 are presented in the notes.
“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” was delivered as a lecture on March 12, 1940, at Columbia University and was delivered again a few weeks later at the Schomberg Library in Harlem. Most of the text appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature for June 1, 1940, and a more condensed version was published in Negro Digest in the fall of 1940. The first complete printed text was published by Harper and Brothers as a separate 39-page pamphlet in August 1940. Harper and Brothers had intended to use the essay as an introduction to a special “Author’s Edition” of Native Son, but when sales slowed, they put off the special edition and issued the essay in pamphlet form. Harper and Brothers added the essay to later printings of Native Son in early 1942, using the same plates as the pamphlet. This volume prints the text of “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” from the 1940 pamphlet published by Harper and Brothers.
This volume presents the texts of the original editions or typescripts chosen for inclusion; it does not attempt to reproduce features of the typographic design, such as the display capitalization of chapter openings. The texts are reproduced without change, except for the correction of typographical errors (and the inclusion of the three corrections requested by Wright in Native Son). Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization often are expressive features and they
are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of the typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number: 20.6, note….; 56.30, drive car; 74.14, by and by; 103.29, mucles; 163.22, is?; 216.18, W—what’s; 233.16, anounce; 261.28, oughn’t’ve; 423.24–25, capitol; 464.7, damned; 509.3, saw; 525.32, Bigger?; 538.22, complimentary.
About the Author
RICHARD WRIGHT won international renown for his powerful and visceral depiction of the black experience. He stands today alongside such African American luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and two of his books, Native Son and Black Boy, are required reading in high schools and colleges across the nation. His final, unfinished novel, A Father’s Law, was recently rediscovered and published posthumously. He died in 1960.
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ALSO BY RICHARD WRIGHT
Uncle Tom’s Children
Native Son
Black Boy
The Outsider
Savage Holiday
Black Power: A Record of Reaction in the Land of Pathos
Pagan Spain: A Report of a Journey into the Past
White Man, Listen!
The Long Dream
Eight Men
American Hunger
Rite of Passage
A Father’s Law
Copyright
Acknowledgment is made to The Saturday Review of Literature for permission to reproduce those parts of “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” that appeared in the issue of 1 June 1940. The article was published in its entirety for the time in 1940 by Harper & Brothers.
NATIVE SON. Copyright © 1940 by Richard Wright. Restored edition copyright © 1993 by Ellen Wright. Introduction copyright © 1993 by Arnold Rampersad. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-193541-1
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Richard Wright, Native Son
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