Native Son (Wallace Stegner's copy)

New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1940. First edition. Hardcover. Very Good. 359pp. Octavo [21 cm] Dark blue cloth over boards, with titles in gray and red ink stamped panels on the backstrip and front board. Spine rolled. Extremities gently bumped and rubbed. No dust jacket. Ex-libris Wallace Stegner, with his signature in pen on the front free endpaper. Stegner was a prolific author of fiction and historical nonfiction set mainly in the American West. His influence on American writers is enormous. He was often referred to as the "Dean of Western Writers." A first edition of Richard Wright's powerful and highly influential novel set in Chicago in the 1930s. "Native Son" is a candid reflection on the poverty and despair experienced by people in inner cities across America, and of what it means to be an African American in America.

“If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son.” – Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Inventory #: 67893)