SOURCE: "Native Son and An American Tragedy: Two Different Interpretations of Crime and Guilt," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, Spring, 1979, pp. 208-26.

In the following essay, Hakutani discusses the influence of An American Tragedy on Richard Wright's crime novel Black Boy, noting similarities in the two writers' views of crime and punishment.

I

Theodore Dreiser is, among modern novelists, one of the most influential predecessors of Richard Wright. In an episode from Black Boy, Wright tells us how he was inspired by Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie: "It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novels, and I could not read enough of them."¹ Such acknowledgment must have convinced critics that...