Native Son Reading Level: A Complete Guide

What Reading Level Is Native Son?

Lexile 700L; ATOS not confirmed. Word count varies by edition: approximately 126,000 words (1940 Book-of-the-Month Club text) to approximately 148,500 words (restored Library of America text). Interest level grades 9–adult. Our assessment: grades 11–12, ages 16–18, primarily for AP Literature and advanced senior English. The Lexile of 700L reflects Wright’s direct, propulsive prose style — accessible in sentence-level complexity — but the novel’s thematic demands, psychological depth, and content (graphic violence, racial slurs, sexual content in the restored edition) make it most appropriate for mature 11th–12th grade readers. For official scores, visit Lexile.com or AR BookFinder.

Two Editions — The Book-of-the-Month Club Text and the Restored Text

Before publication in 1940, the Book-of-the-Month Club — which had selected Native Son as its main selection, making Wright the first Black author to receive this distinction — required cuts to Wright’s original manuscript. The cuts included a scene in which Bigger masturbates in a movie theater, additional sexual content, some racial content, and passages that were deemed too inflammatory. The 1940 Book-of-the-Month Club text was the standard edition for decades.

The Library of America restored Wright’s original manuscript text, first published in their two-volume Richard Wright: Early Works (1991). The Harper Perennial Deluxe edition uses this restored text and also includes Wright’s essay “How Bigger Was Born” and notes on the text. The restored edition is longer, more graphic, and considered by scholars to be the authoritative version of the novel. Teachers and parents should be aware that the two versions differ, and should confirm which edition is being used when checking page counts or word counts.

What Age Is Native Son Appropriate For?

Ages 16–18, grades 11–12. Content worth noting for parents and teachers:

What Is Native Son About?

Bigger Thomas is twenty years old and has lived his entire life on Chicago’s South Side, in the Black Belt — the overcrowded, impoverished neighborhood to which Black residents of Chicago were largely confined by formal and informal segregation in the 1930s. He lives with his mother Hannah, his brother Buddy, and his sister Vera in a single room. He has had previous encounters with the law. He has been offered work as a chauffeur for the Dalton family — wealthy white philanthropists who own much of the slum housing in the Black Belt, including the building where Bigger’s family lives.

Book One: Fear. On Bigger’s first night as the Daltons’ chauffeur, he drives Mary Dalton and her boyfriend Jan Erlone — a Communist organizer — around the city, eating and drinking with them. Both Jan and Mary insist on treating Bigger as an equal, which frightens and disorients Bigger in ways he cannot articulate. He carries the drunk Mary to her bedroom. When her blind mother enters the room, Bigger, in a panic, smothers Mary with a pillow to prevent her discovery. He burns Mary’s body in the Dalton furnace and begins constructing a cover story, eventually attempting to frame Jan for the murder.

Book Two: Flight. As the investigation into Mary’s disappearance closes in on Bigger, he flees into the South Side with his girlfriend Bessie Mears. He kills Bessie — fearing she will betray him — and flees alone. He is eventually captured on a rooftop by a large police force and mob.

Book Three: Fate. Bigger is tried for the murder of Mary Dalton; Bessie’s murder is used primarily as evidence of his character rather than charged separately. His attorney, Boris Max — a Communist lawyer — delivers a lengthy argument that frames Bigger’s crimes as the product of a racially structured society that denied him full humanity. Bigger is sentenced to death. In his final conversations with Max before his execution, Bigger reaches a partial self-understanding: that what he felt after Mary’s killing — fear transmuted into something like agency — was the only moment in his life when he felt that he had acted.

Native Son Characters

“How Bigger Was Born” — Wright’s Essay

Most standard editions of Native Son include Wright’s essay “How Bigger Was Born,” originally delivered as a lecture and published in 1940. In it, Wright describes the composite of real people and experiences that contributed to the character of Bigger Thomas — including five different Black men Wright had known, each representing a different form of violent resistance to the constraints of Jim Crow. He also describes the compositional history of the novel and his intentions for what Bigger would represent. The essay is frequently assigned alongside the novel and provides the most direct statement of Wright’s own understanding of the character. Teachers who want students to understand Wright’s intentions before engaging with the novel typically assign excerpts from “How Bigger Was Born” as an introduction.

Is Native Son Banned?

Native Son has been challenged and banned in multiple school districts across several decades, primarily for graphic violence, sexual content, and profanity. Documented challenges include: Goffstown, New Hampshire (1978); Elmwood Park, New Jersey (1978); North Adams, Massachusetts (1981); Berrian Springs, Michigan (1988); High Point, North Carolina (1996); Fort Wayne, Indiana (1998); and Irvington High School in Fremont, California (1998), where it was removed after parents called it unnecessarily violent and sexually explicit. The original 1940 Book-of-the-Month Club text — which removed several of the most explicit scenes — was in many cases the edition being challenged; the restored text is more graphic.

Native Son Themes and Lessons

The novel’s structural argument — that Bigger’s crimes are the product of the social conditions of racial segregation and poverty rather than individual pathology — is made explicitly through Boris Max’s courtroom speech, which is also the novel’s most disputed element. James Baldwin, in his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” argued that Wright’s approach in Native Son dehumanized Bigger by reducing him to a sociological argument, making him a product of conditions rather than a full human being. This debate — between Wright’s protest novel approach and Baldwin’s critique of it — is a standard AP Literature discussion and one of the most productive contexts for reading the novel.

The novel’s treatment of Bessie Mears is frequently discussed in contemporary teaching contexts. Bigger kills Bessie deliberately; her death is more morally straightforward than Mary’s accidental killing; and yet the legal system and the novel’s dramatic energy both focus on Mary’s death rather than Bessie’s. This disparity reflects the racial hierarchy the novel is critiquing — the life of a Black woman is treated as less significant than the life of a white woman — and is itself a subject of analysis.

Discussion questions: What does Boris Max’s argument say about who is really on trial in Book Three — and does Wright endorse that argument? How does the novel treat Bessie’s death differently from Mary’s — and what does that reflect about the society Wright depicts? What does Bigger mean when he says, near the end, that what he has done is “murder” and yet it felt like something he needed to do? How does Wright’s essay “How Bigger Was Born” change how you read the novel?

Books Similar to Native Son

About Richard Wright

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908, at a plantation between Roxie and Natchez, Mississippi. His father, a sharecropper, abandoned the family when Wright was five; his mother suffered a series of strokes that left her incapacitated, and Wright spent much of his childhood moving between relatives and orphanages in Mississippi and Tennessee. He was largely self-educated, reading voraciously despite the limited access to books in the Jim Crow South. He moved to Memphis and then Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and joined the Communist Party in the 1930s — an affiliation that influenced the political framework of Native Son and that he later broke with. His short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) established his reputation. Native Son (1940) and his memoir Black Boy (1945) are his most widely taught works. In 1946 he moved to Paris, where he joined the circle of existentialist writers and thinkers and spent the rest of his life. He died in Paris on November 28, 1960. The relationship between Wright and Ralph Ellison — who was his protégé and then his literary critic — and between Wright and James Baldwin — who published influential critiques of Wright’s protest novel approach — are among the most discussed relationships in American literary history.