Sheldon Brivic

Bio: Sheldon Brivic is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Wright. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 15 citations.

Conflict of Values: Richard Wright's "Native Son"

Abstract: Ezra Pound's well known definition, "Literature is news that STAYS news," applies well to Richard Wright's Native Son. Thirty years after the novel first created a sensation, readers are still impressed by the tremendous revelatory power with which it portrays the situation of the black man in the American ghetto. During the fifties, the reputation of Native Son suffered an eclipse as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and others attacked the book for its grim pessimism, its negative view of black culture, and its seeming obsession with violence. But with the social upheaval of the late sixties and the tendency away from moderate attitudes and toward confrontation and "telling it like it is" among blacks, the terrible, unsparing view of Wright's novel has been vindicated. Eldridge Cleaver led the way, in Soul on Ice (1967), to a reaffirmation of the absolute position of Wright's novel. Wright, he said, "reigns supreme for his profound political, economic, and social reference." 1 Until 1968, there were no books on Wright; by 1970, there were six books and two pamphlets. In a 1971 New York Times review of an impressive novel, Addison Gayle refers to the new work as "the most important work of fiction by an AfroAmerican since Native Son," 2 and other references could be produced to show that Wright's book is now generally held to be the foremost work of Afro-American fiction and one of the key American novels of the century. Strangely, however, even while virtually unanimous agreement exists as to the extraordinary merit of Wright's book, critics have generally agreed that there is something significantly faulty about Native Son, and that the book's faults spring from Wright's inadequate control of the ideology behind his novel. Robert Bone is expressing critical consensus when he says, "As a work of art Native Son is seriously flawed" and speaks of "philosophical confusion at the heart of" the novel.3 Dan McCall, in his excellent study, The Example of Richard Wright, says that Wright's book and its protagonist fall "out of focus" during the latter section of the work because of the imposition of massive doses of communist propaganda on Bigger Thomas' world.4 Edward Margolies