Native Son (Perennial Classics) [Abridged] [Paperback]

Richard Wright's brutal and gripping novel was a huge hit - selling at a rate of 2,000 copies a day - on first publication in 1940. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Bigger Thomas, a black boy, has to die in the electric chair before he can feel alive. He has to kill before he finds a reason to live - kill the only people who had ever reached for his lost soul, a rich white girl who believed in equality and a poor black girl who accepted that there was none. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Richard Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908. As a child he lived in Memphis, Tennessee, then in an orphanage, and with various relatives. He left home at fifteen and returned to Memphis for two years to work, and in 1934 went to Chicago, where in 1935, he began to work on the Federal Writers' Project. He published Uncle Tom's Children in 1938 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the following year. After the Second World War, he went to live in Paris with his wife and daughters, remaining there until his death in 1960. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.