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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. Wright's 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".
As the decade came to its close, a major novel explaining
territory unfamiliar to most American readers drew
superlatives from critics in all camps: Richard Wright's
Native Son (1940). Both Commonweal and the
New Yorker compared it to Dreiser and used the
term "strong meat". "From the moment a giant rat steals
into the Thomas family's one-room flat until Bigger in
his death cell bids his attorney farewell, Native
Son is a shocker".
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Introduction
