Even for the staunchest opponent of censorship, the passages depicting such wanton violence against women, and especially the descriptions of the “new-born strength” and pride Bigger takes in killing a white woman and his almost off-handed rape and murder of his girlfriend are hard to stomach. How would Native Son, with its horrifying portrayal of the smothering and dismemberment of one woman, and the rape and bludgeoning to death of another, have fared, we wonder, if it were being offered for publication in 1990 instead of in 1940. Reportedly, prior to this official announcement, two editors assigned to prepare the text, both female, withdrew from the assignment.Īt a time when First Amendment rights and artistic freedom seem under assault, knowing where, or if, to draw the line presents a constant dilemma. The publishers cited the novel’s graphic depictions of a serial killer’s mutilations of women as the reason for their decision. Recently, the prestigious publishing house of Simon and Schuster, in an apparently unprecedented reversal, decided against publishing a novel entitled American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Given both the nature and the brutality of certain of its scenes, we are struck by the details of the current controversy over a novel reported in the New York Times. Its title arises frequently, amid some prestigious company, in discussions concerning school reading lists. Native Son is, undeniably, a novel of violence. Today, fifty years after Harper and Brothers released the novel that was to become a best-seller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a number of the issues raised, the objections it drew, and the dark predictions it proffered have a great deal of relevance both in literary and in societal terms. To these forces, Wright’s novel is a self-professed note of warning: an apocalyptic prediction of the horror that horror engenders. To a society capable of Jim Crow laws, to an elaborate social system that showed itself more adept at creating and then destroying monsters than at preventing their existence. To a society capable of Jim Crow laws, to an elaborate social system that showed itself more adept at creating and then destroying monsters than at preventing their existence.īut in addition to these two levels of meaning, as the author himself will allude to in the introductory piece, “How Bigger was Born,” the novel itself is meant to sound an alarm.

The novel itself is meant to sound an alarm.

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