Richard Wright: Native Son (1940)

[jserraglio]

First time reading. Can't believe I never picked up this influential classic. Still shocking 80 years later.

I really like its use of mixed POV and ear for African-American vernacular speech. Had to have been a major influence on Ellison a decade later. Case in point: Ellison appears to have transmuted Bigger's brutalization of the drunken Mary into the Invisible Man's empathic treatment of the troubled and inebriated Sybil at the outset of the Harlem riot scene that closes the novel and points forward to the resolution found in the Epilogue.