Bigger

Bigger is a biography of Bigger Thomas, the central figure of Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son. Bigger is hard to pin down. He is a troubled, violent young man who rejects society's rules, both a victim and a perpetrator, shaped by racism and segregation on Chicago's South Side. He steals, rapes and kills without remorse. For more than eighty years his story has gripped readers, and it still fuels arguments about representation, respectability, social justice and racism in American life.

Trudier Harris, a distinguished scholar of English, traces Bigger's literary life from his creation to the present. She looks at the 1930s and 1940s debates between Black critics and Communist artists over the "political novel," the censorship of Native Son by white publishers, and how the book was first received. She then follows later readings by Black feminists and Black Power activists, and ends with the novel's resonance for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Harris presents Bigger as the central, unsettling knot in the history of American racism, a figure who condemns and disturbs and has not gone away.