Bily has written for a wide variety of educational publishers, and directs an interdisciplinary college program for talented high school students. In the following essay, she discusses the strategies Wright uses to present Fred Daniels both as a representative African-American man in a racist society and as an Everyman whose Crisis transcends race.

When a writer produces a story that becomes an overnight sensation, it is usually because she or he has written something that touches a nerve in the audience, often one that the readers did not even know was raw and exposed. This is what happened with Richard Wright's Native Son, which became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and sold 200,000 copies in three weeks. Many found in Wright's novel their first exposure to what life was like for African Americans in the Northern cities. Certainly, most of the book's white readers had no intimate acquaintance with...