Dalton, his blind wife, and Mary Dalton, their twenty-year-old radical communist daughter, who Bigger sees as dangerous. Dalton, a wealthy white man who hires Bigger as his family’s driver. Bigger relents, but he is full of anger and frustration about his limited life. Thomas begs Bigger to keep his appointment for a job interview that evening lest the family lose the relief money that is supporting them. Native Son was the first major American novel that looked deeply and unflinchingly into the rage and fragmentation of Black identity that resulted from oppression.īigger Thomas, a twenty-year-old Black man, wakes up early in the squalid one-room apartment he shares with his mother and two siblings. Wright hoped that Native Son would shock and horrify the white liberals who read his books, course-correcting what he felt was the sentimentality of his earlier book of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children. They flouted Jim Crow laws and lived their lives with the conviction that asserting their humanity and equality by refusing to comply was more important than the consequences. These five Biggers had been hardened and angry at white people and the systemic oppression that kept them down, sometimes turning that anger inward and bullying other Black youths. In his essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (1940), Wright explains that he based the protagonist of the novel on five young Black men he had known as a child.
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