A ‘Native Son’ Reimagined, With James Baldwin in Mind

In 1949, James Baldwin, a young writer who Wright had championed and mentored, published an essay titled “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which critiqued “Native Son” for continuing to perpetuate the racial stereotypes that “it was written to destroy.” For Baldwin, Bigger’s true tragedy was not being poor or black or American, but that “he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being subhuman and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed to him at his birth.”