Native Son - Richard Wright [208]
At last I found out how to end the book; I ended it just as I had begun it, showing Bigger living dangerously, taking his life into his hands, accepting what life had made him. The lawyer, Max, was placed in Bigger’s cell at the end of the novel to register the moral—or what I felt was the moral—horror of Negro life in the United States.
The writing of Native Son was to me an exciting, enthralling, and even a romantic experience. With what I’ve learned in the writing of this book, with all of its blemishes, imperfections, with all of its unrealized potentialities, I am launching out upon another novel, this time about the status of women in modern American society. This book, too, goes back to my childhood just as Bigger went, for, while I was storing away impressions of Bigger, I was storing away impressions of many other things that made me think and wonder. Some experience will ignite somewhere deep down in me the smoldering embers of new fires and I’ll be off again to write yet another novel. It is good to live when one feels that such as that will happen to one. Life becomes sufficient unto life; the rewards of living are found in living.
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