Native son, and

Bigger is black, twenty, living with his family in a one-room rat-infested apartment in Chicago, going with a girl he doesn't care about, hanging out with friends he doesn't like, unemployed.

He is forced to take a job to keep his mother and siblings in their apartment. The job is acting as a chauffeur for a rich white family. On his very first night as chauffeur, everything goes wrong and he kills the daughter.

Native Son is a starkly realistic picture of life as a young black man in a big city in mid-20th century America.