Native Son | Native Son's Guilty Man

In the following excerpt, Holladay dissects the motivations behind Max and his faulty defense of Bigger Thomas.

Boris Max’s speech defending Bigger Thomas in Native Son has been called [by James Baldwin in “Many Thousands Gone,” Notes of a Native Son, Dial, 1963] “one of the most desperate performances in American fiction.” By the time Max arrives on the scene late in Richard Wright’s novel, Bigger has already been sentenced to death by the white mobs who hate and fear him for killing Mary Dalton. We have little reason to expect that Max’s oratory will reverse Bigger’s apparent fate. Max, however, seems to feel otherwise. Brought into the case by Jan Erlone,...

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