“I stumbled upon a copy of it on my mother’s shelf when I was 8 years old. “I didn’t choose ‘Native Son.’ ‘Native Son’ chose me,” Kelley said in an email. Kelley said she decided to adapt the novel because she has loved Wright’s work for many years. Kelley’s adaptation is directed by Seret Scott and deals mostly with the first two parts of the novel. Wright’s novel tells the story of how Thomas has to survive in an already prejudiced world after accidentally killing the daughter of the rich white Dalton family-a family who employs him as a driver.
“Native Son” tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a poor 20-year-old black man living on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s. Kelley’s stage adaptation of the novel, which will run through Oct. But he wasn't pleased with its reception.Richard Wright’s classic novel “Native Son” proved to be controversial when it was first published in 1940, and that controversy remains in Nambi E. But Wright put all of his frustrations about growing up in poverty in Mississippi during racial segregation and the Jim Crow era into his writing, subsequently paving the way for the likes of literary heroes such as James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and Gwendolyn Brooks.īorn on Septemin a small town called Roxie, Wright first rose to prominence with the collection of short stories, Uncle Tom's Children, published in 1938. The social unrest, race riots, and political rancor of that time didn't make it a particularly favorable time for a sharecropper's son to succeed as an author. To give you an idea of what a huge accomplishment it was at the time for the then-31-year-old writer, actress Hattie McDaniel had just become the first African-American ever to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Gone With the Wind. When one of the best Richard Wright books was published in 1940- Native Son- it became the first best-selling novel by an African-American author ever.
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