A rat scurries across a one-room apartment on Chicago's South Side, and a young man kills it with a skillet while his family screams, and in that opening scene the entire architecture of the novel is already visible. Richard Wright published Native Son in 1940, and its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, became the figure that forced white America to see what its systems of confinement had created. Bigger is not sympathetic in any comfortable sense; he kills, and Wright refuses to soften the killing into allegory. What Wright insists upon is that Bigger's violence is not aberration but product, the consequence of a world that offers a Black man only fear and the brief, terrible power of destruction. The novel has lost none of its force.