A p harper (1 Ergebnisse)

Octavo, navy blue cloth (hardcover), uncut, xi + 359 pp. The dust jacket is olive green; the cloth binding is blue, with gilt chain links illustrating the upper quarter of the spine, a black spine label, and gilt letters. Very Good, with former-owner inscription to ffep and tanning to endpapers; in a Good+, myalr protected dust jacket with edgewear that includes light chipping. From dust jacket: On this remarkable novel Henry Seidel Canby makes the following comment: This powerful and sensational novel is very difficult to describe so as to convey its real prupse and its real strength. But it is important to describe it accurately, because it is certainly the finest novel as yet written by an American Nego -- not that it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club just because it was written by a Negro. It would have been chosen for its deep excitement and intense interest whether written by white, yellow, or black. Yet, nevertheless, this is a novel which only a Negro could have written; whose theme is the mind of the Negro we see every day; whose emotion is the emotion of that native born American under the stress of a social situation difficult in the extreme; whose point and purpose are not race war or propaganda of any kind, but to show how a "bad nigger" is amde from human material that might have become something very different. Superficially, Native Son is a crime story, adventurous, exciting, often terrible -- with two murders, a chase and a gun fight over the roofs of Chicao, a trial, and what might have been, but was not, a rape. It is the old story of a man hunted down by society. But the reader will get through only a few chapters before h e realizes that there is something different in this story. Bigger -- and we all know Bigger -- is no persecuted black saint. His family is a good tenement family, as tenement families go; but he is a bad actor from the first. He is mean; he is a coward; he is on occasion liar, thief, and bully. There is no sentimentalism in the writer who created Bigger, and made him chauffeur in the family of a wealthy philanthropist who spent some of the money wrung from Negro tenements on benefits for the race. Bigger is headed toward jail from the first chapter. When Mary Dalton, the flighty daughter of the philanthropist, asks Bigger to help along her intrigue with her Communist lover (also a negrophile), he has no compunctions. But he did not mean to kill her, he did not want to kill her, though he hated patronizing whites. Had her blind mother not come in at the fatal moement, the girl would have slept off her drunkeness, and Bigger would never have got beyond petty crime. With a skill which any master of the detective story might envy, Mr. Wright builds his book on the inevitable and terrifying results of an unpremeditated killing; the burning of the body; the false accusations; the murder of Bigger's Negro girl friend, lest she implicate him; the capture; the trial in which Mr. Max, the defending lawyer, pleads unsuccessfully the cause of a race driven toward crime, against a district attorney needing notoriety for his next election. And finally comes Bigger's confession -- not of the murder which was not a murder, and of the rape which was not a rape, but of the obscure inarticulate causes which made him hate, and made him try to make up for his sense of inferiority by aggressive acts against the society in which he lived. Literature, Americana. TAS.…