Richard Wright

Bigger Thomas, twenty, lives with his mother and siblings in one rat-infested room on Chicago's South Side. He takes a job as chauffeur to the wealthy Dalton family, who own slum property including his own building and consider themselves philanthropists. Their daughter Mary and her communist boyfriend Jan insist on treating him as an equal, which terrifies him. Driving a drunken Mary home, he carries her to her room; when her blind mother appears in the doorway he smothers Mary with a pillow to keep her quiet, and she dies. He burns the body in the furnace, attempts to frame Jan, extorts a ransom, and later kills his girlfriend Bessie. Caught after a rooftop chase, he is defended by the communist lawyer Max, whose long courtroom speech argues that American society produced him. He is sentenced to death, and in the cell finally claims the killings as his own act.

Wright's naturalism is deliberate and argumentative: Bigger is constructed as a product of environment, and the novel's three-part structure — Fear, Flight, Fate — refuses the reader any comfort of sympathy, since Bigger is neither innocent nor likeable. In How Bigger Was Born, Wright explained that he wrote the book so hard and deep that readers would have to face it without the consolation of tears, having found Uncle Tom's Children too easy to weep over. The Marxist frame of Max's speech sits uneasily with the ending, where Bigger's self-recognition is individual rather than political. James Baldwin's attack, arguing that protest fiction reduces its subject to a category and so repeats the dehumanisation it opposes, is the standard counter-argument and the founding text of a long generational quarrel.