RADICAL RESPONSES TO THE GREAT
DEPRESSION Radical Novels |
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Native Son. Such black writers as Dunbar and Chesnutt had been
largely forgotten, and the recent Harlem Renaissance had Twenties'
affiliations that were unfashionable. Wright, whose poverty-stricken
boyhood in Mississippi is unsparingly detailed in his autobiography,
Black Boy (1944), found the proletarian spirit of the 1930s
completely congenial, a natural outlet for writing about the black
experience. Wrightís first published book, Uncle Tom's
Children (1938), a collection of four novellas dealing with black
oppression in the South, received glowing reviews (a notable
exception being Zora Neale Hurston's in the Saturday Review of
Literature) and Story magazine's prize for the best
book-length manuscript submitted by anyone connected with the Federal
Writer's Project. It was, however, Native Son which gained
national and international acclaim. Writing in The Spectator,
Rosamond Lehmann expressed the conclusions of most readers: "To me
the scope and passionate sincerity of the book give it a grandeur, a
moral importance at least as good as that of An American
Tragedy". |