[In] Native Son Wright almost succeeds in achieving the imaginative liberation he sought by writing it. The book eventually runs aground in the author's own intellectuality, a quality which, for the novel's sake, he had succeeded in suppressing both too well and not well enough.

The first two-thirds of Native Son constitute one of the most exciting stretches of melodrama in American literature. (p. 33)

From [the moment of Mary Dalton's death] until Bigger's capture by the police on a snow-covered tenement rooftop some two hundred pages later the novel is pure movement, the kind of overwhelming narrative torrent that Wright had already made into a trademark in a story like " Down By the Riverside." In Native Son this narrative flow serves the additional function of showing what has happened to Bigger's existence. Every one of his acts now, in contrast with the torpor that had prevailed in the...