Richard Wright's novel arrived like a bomb in 1940, refusing every consolation white America had offered itself about race. Bigger Thomas, poor and Black in Chicago, commits a terrible act, and Wright traces every environmental and psychological force that made it inevitable without ever excusing it. The prose is blunt and propulsive, the courtroom scenes devastating. James Baldwin later quarreled with the book, but acknowledged its seismic impact. This is a novel that changed what American fiction could do and say.