Wright's first and best-known novel, Native Son (1940), is the story of Bigger Thomas, an African American teenager who accidentally kills someone and is sentenced to death.

White Man, Listen! (1957) is a collection of Wright's better-known essays.

James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) is the story of an African American family in Harlem during the depression. Baldwin, like Wright, was an expatriate living in France, and in fact the two knew each other and had a stormy friendship.

Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison, became an immediate classic for its portrait of racial intolerance in the United States in the 1950s—an ugly picture painted by the narrator, a young, unnamed black man.