Since its publication in 1940, Richard Wright's Native Son has been a controversial milestone in American literature. A groundbreaking work of social realism, Wright's powerful novel was the first by an African American author to be chosen by the Book of the Month Club and immediately established his place in the American canon. Andrew Warnes has produced the first critical and contextual companion to the novel.

The volume contains a number of illuminating contextual essays by Warnes alongside a selection of scholarship on Native Son. In his discussion of the text, Warnes pays particular attention to the question of voice. He draws on Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia and polyphony to understand the multiple and conflicting voices within the text. Whilst acknowledging Wright's complex attitude towards African American oral culture, Warnes asks how “the African-American voices in this book … relate to the profound debt that Wright owed to nineteenth century European literatures” (xvi). He focusses on the influence of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, making a number of important comparisons between the two authors to argue that Dostoyevsky enabled Wright to overcome the pieties of social realism and establish “a far profounder empathy for those on the margins of life,” granting the poor “unprecedented dramatic authority” (15). Warnes claims that “Wright shared Bakhtin's appreciation of Dostoyevsky's development of the polyphonic novel … and wished to follow his example by creating a literary image of Chicago every bit as kaleidoscopic as Crime and Punishment's image of St Petersburg” (18). This comparison allows Warnes to make greater sense of the competing voices within Native Son, and allows for an insightful interpretation of the “unconvincing” conclusion to the novel (20). He then goes on to examine Native Son in relation to Marxism, the blues, black vernacular and representations of whiteness.

Warnes also gives a cogent and insightful overview of the critical history surrounding the novel, from early responses by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Irving Howe – in particular essays such as “Everybody's Protest Novel” and “Black Boys and Native Sons” – to recent readings of Wright as a transnational figure through Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. Warnes also considers Wright's relationship with the postcolonial world, paying particular attention to the crucial, if frequently overlooked, influence Native Son had on Frantz Fanon. Throughout Warnes writes clearly; his argument is free of critical jargon, sensitive to wider contextual and historical issues and eminently suited to the undergraduate or postgraduate reader.

Finally, Warnes reproduces several key essays about Native Son. These include James Baldwin's monumental “Many Thousands Gone” as well as more recent scholarship by Hazel Rowley, Anthony Dawahare, Clare Eby and James Smethurst. Each essay is prefaced by Warnes, who summarizes the key points and situates it in the overall critical history of Native Son. Inclusion of bibliographies, biographical information about Wright and a chronology of key events in African American history combine to make this a valuable companion for all students of the text.