It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s.

Bigger's lawyer, Boris Max, makes the case that there is no escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American, since they are the necessary product of the society that formed them and told them since birth who exactly they were supposed to be.

The room turns into a maelstrom, and after a violent chase, Bigger kills the animal with an iron skillet and terrorizes his sister Vera with the dead rat.

After the conversation, Peggy, an Irish cook, takes Bigger to his room and tells him the Daltons are a nice family, but he must avoid Mary's Communist friends.

Throughout the evening, Jan and Mary talk to Bigger, oblige him to take them to a diner where their friends are eating, invite him to sit at their table, and tell him to call them by their first names.

At the diner, they buy a bottle of rum, then Bigger drives throughout Washington Park while Jan and Mary drink and make out in the back seat.

Ultimately, the snap decisions which the law calls "crimes" arose from assaults to his dignity, and being trapped like the rat he killed with a pan, living a life where others held the skillet.

Although she dies earlier in the story, she remains a significant plot element, as Bigger constantly has flashbacks during stressful times, in which he sees various scenes from her murder.

Henry Dalton: Father of Mary, owns a controlling amount of stock in a real estate firm that maintains the black ghetto.

He does this while donating money to the NAACP, buying ping-pong tables for the local black youth outreach program, and giving people like Bigger a chance at employment.

Wright based aspects of the novel on the 1938 arrest and trial of Robert Nixon, executed in 1939 following a series of "brick bat murders" in Los Angeles and Chicago.

[3] Native Son was the original title of Chicago writer Nelson Algren's first novel, Somebody in Boots, based on a piece of doggerel about the first Texan.

It was one of the earliest successful attempts to explain the racial divide in America in terms of the social conditions imposed on African Americans by the dominant white society.

No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies ... [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.

In 1991, Native Son was published for the first time in its entirety by the Library of America, together with an introduction, a chronology, and notes by Arnold Rampersad, a well-regarded scholar of African American literary works.

[10] Some teachers believe the themes in Native Son and other challenged books "foster dialogue and discussion in the classroom"[11] and "guide students into the reality of the complex adult and social world.

This contrast between the characters of Bigger Thomas and Uncle Tom may be Wright's attempt to show the contemporary racial conflicts that persisted long after the publication of Stowe's novel in 1852.

[20] Critics attacked Max's final speech in the courtroom, claiming that it was an irrelevant elaboration on Wright's own Communist beliefs and unrelated to Bigger's case.

In the motion picture The Help (2011), the main character (played by Emma Stone) is seen in an oblique camera angle to have a copy of Native Son on her bookshelf.

The 2019 adaptation was directed by Rashid Johnson and starred Ashton Sanders (as Bigger Thomas), Margaret Qualley, Nick Robinson and KiKi Layne.

James Baldwin's short story Previous Condition mentions a lead part in a play production of Native Son as "type-casting".

Native Son is mentioned in Edward Bunker's novel Little Boy Blue (1981) as being read while in solitary confinement by the main character, Alex Hammond, who is said to be greatly fascinated by it.

A line from the trial speech by Bigger Thomas' lawyer, Boris Max, is woven into the plot of Lemony Snicket's book, The Penultimate Peril (2005): "Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school, asks a famous unfathomable question.... 'Who knows when some slight shock,' he asks, 'disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?'

So when Mr. Wright asks his question, he might be wondering if a small event, such as a stone dropping into a pond, can cause ripples in the system of the world, and tremble the things that people want, until all this rippling and trembling brings down something enormous,..."[21] In Ron Suskind's book, A Hope in the Unseen (1998), Native Son is referenced during a discussion the main character takes part in at Brown University.

On the HBO series Brave New Voices, during the 2008 finals, the Chicago team performed a poem called "Lost Count: A Love Story".

[25] The book was newly adapted and directed again by Kent Gash (in conjunction with the Paul Green Foundation) for Intiman Theatre in Seattle, Washington, in 2006.

Audiences were also split along the divide of race and gender: they were forced to choose between sympathizing with a rapist, or condemn him and ignore that he was a victim of systemic racism.

Wright exaggerated his characters with the intention of gaining the sympathies of white people, but many of his audiences felt that it perpetuated stereotypes of African Americans with little to no benefit.

One of the few successes noted was that the controversial, struggling Bigger Thomas was a strong attack on white people who wanted to be comforted by complacent black characters onstage.

[33] Clyde Taylor, an associate professor of English at Tufts University, criticized Bradley's view, claiming that the analysis failed to perceive how the work "disrupted the accommodation to racism through polite conventions in American social discourse".