Lawd Today, written during the 1930's but unpublished until 1963, portrays the unrelieved frustration and consequent violence of black American life—themes Wright developed more strikingly in his next and greater novel, Native Son. Lawd Today, however, is not merely a preliminary sketch for the later novel. Unlike Bigger Thomas, Jake Jackson, Lawd Today's protagonist, develops no revolutionary consciousness of himself or his social condition because he aspires to a distorted version of the American dream and refuses personal responsibility for his actions.

As a postal clerk and recent arrival in Chicago from the South, Jake still belongs properly to the black masses; however, his steady employment in hard times, his attitudes toward the white society, and his aspirations to status based on material prosperity move him to the brink of the black middle class as described twenty years after the composition of Lawd Today by E. Franklin...