Genderisms, Decapitated and Smashed Heads

Bigger's pain is seething and unrelenting throughout Richard Wright's bestseller novel, Native Son (1940), until he states, "Tell Jan hello" to his Lawyer Max. The pain of Richard Wright is reflected this author's creation-a reflection of Wright's own pain growing up in Mississippi. Born is 1908 in Roxie, Mississippi near Natchez, the writer is able to create the Bigger character who becomes the most compelling one in twentieth century American literature. Wright came to Memphis, Tennessee after graduating from Smith Robertson school in Jackson, Mississippi and in Black Boy (1945) surreptitiously gets books written by H. L. Mencken, a white male critic of the south. Wright observes Mencken using words as weapons and thinks he, too, can use words as weapons. In doing so, his novels Native Soon and Black Boy catapults his career with Native Son becoming the major black protest novel of the twentieth century. Dr. Yvonne Robinson Jones' Genderisms: Decapitated and Smashed Heads: An Analysis of Richard Wright's major fictions captures yet capsizes the plight of the female characters like Mary Dalton and Bessie Smears who represent the victimization and challenging plights of females not only in American society but throughout our global communities.