Though tempted to embark on a life of crime, 20-year-old Bigger Thomas is instead drawn to a white, affluent world that will give him a job, but not equality. Strongly attracted to his employer's freethinking socialist daughter, Bigger will see his freedom slip away in a single tragic night. Soon he will be on the run, having killed twice—once by accident, and once in cold blood. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's "enormously stirring novel" (New York Times) charts Bigger's swift downward spiral while examining what it means to be black in America.