Native Son
Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. 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.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
4mentions
3people
2013–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'd love to hear what books influenced you when you were younger and how. I am trying to stock up on books that would benefit my son to read (and me as we read them together).
Native Son by Richard Wright really hit me hard in high school. I'd love to hear what had a big impact on you.
- My Side of the Mountain was one my mom got me that has really stuck with me. About a boy running away from home and living in a tree, so good -> https://shepherd.com/book/my-side-of-the-mountain
I loved Robin Hood, and at my local library, I found this amazing book called Bows Against the Barons by Geoffrey Trease. I highly recommend it as I loved it -> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1719399.Bows_Against_the...
Rifles for Watie was another one a librarian recommended me and I read in grade school and loved -> https://shepherd.com/book/rifles-for-watie
The classic Dragonlance Chronicles were amazing: https://www.amazon.com/Vol-1-3-Dragonlance-Chronicles-Set/dp...
I loved the Box Car Children, mostly book #1, but the rest were good.
Hardy Boys was also a series I adored, but I am not sure how they have aged.
My son is 7 and he is reading Harry Potter and just loving it. So I highly recommend that one. I didn't read it until college and it is one of my favorite series. She writes incredible characters and weaves them together so perfectly.
As I got to my teenage years... - Dirk Pitt's adventure books kept me reading all day. - Snow Crash really blew my mind. - Catch 22 stood out fo rme. - Atlas Shrugged and all of her books I liked (but not for the weird cult thing. - Classic Tom Clancy - Upton Sinclair The Jungle - Seismic impact on my view of the world. - Native Son in high school is something I think about to this day and bothers me. - From The Holy Mountain - Huge influence on me in my early 20s and where I ended up.
- I was fortunate enough to read Native Son in my high school sophomore English class. While I appreciated it then, a few years ago I revisited it and read Baldwin’s response essay “Everyone’s Protest Novel” and other meta-literature around those works. I don’t have much commentary to say about either work, but I think everyone should read them - especially in today’s world.
- Exactly, exactly. If you see this-- I'm replying late-- lend me an ear:
This analysis itself and the curious overwhelmingly positive response by HN and especially Reddit, as measured by vote tally and the mere inclination of the author to go to the trouble of creating a website solely dedicated to the idea, are, I believe, symptoms of how American schools teach literature.
Before describing my personal experiences, I want to note first that you should forget everything you've heard Americans prop up as excuses for our education system, if not entirely, then at least for this particular discussion. Science and history teachers may need to "teach to the (easiest) test (in the world)", but English teachers can and do assign whatever books they want - the graduation test is basic essay writing.
Anyway, American English teachers are extremely fond, for whatever reason, of "themed" curricula. For example, in my 9th grade English class, we read "Native Son" by Richard Wright (black American), "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe (black Nigerian), "Cry, the Beloved Country" by Alan Paton (black South African), "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad (the only white person on this list, and, inarguably, the only High Literature as well), and something or other by Maya Angelou (black American).
So, if you can't guess, the message that year was black people got it rough. If, in your literary analysis for any section of any of these books (even Conrad's, which isn't even about black people), you concluded that the message the author meant to convey with any even remotely logical elements X, Y, and Z, was that, indeed, black people have it rough, then guess what? You're right. X, Y, and Z mean black people got it rough. A+.
Yes, I mean it. Pick three random paragraphs out of 1984. "Orwell's opinion is that totalitarianism is bad, since, here, the authorities are torturing Winston." A+, you literary genius. Get something wrong for once! Please, just for the sake of variety! "In Fahrenheit 451, the firefighters' helmets are red because communism, which is also red." Oh my God, I never thought of it that way! Somebody get this 16-year-old a Nobel.
(The sole exception to this is Shakespeare, whose meaning behind any one play even the most idiotic English teachers are unwilling to reduce to a single sentence. And, wouldn't you know it, 80% of the students in class will inevitably complain about his insistence on using Victorian English, the big jerk. Literally, I shit you not, the majority of the time American students read Shakespeare, they're reading it in a book wherein the Shakespearean version is printed on left pages and the "modern translation" is printed on the right.)
