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In Native Son Wright shifted his focus from the South to the problems of urban blacks in the North, but his picture of a two-tiered society based on racial discrimination and the protection of property rights remained the same. Although the racist thugs of Uncle Tom's Children are replaced by avaricious landlords, irresponsible journalists, and brutal police in Native Son, the slums of South Side Chicago, like the rural South portrayed in Uncle Tom's Children (1938), are places in which the dreams of success are available to all but the means to achieve them are restricted to the few. The particular hardships of black residents of South Side Chicago are set against the background of the Great Depression, political corruption, wealthy capitalists, and urban blight. Native Son explores the social unrest created by the hard economic times, particularly the interest in radical political solutions represented by Marxists such as Jan Erlone and Boris Max. In creating Native Son, Wright was able to use his personal experience of nearly ten years' residence in South Side Chicago, sociological studies of Chicago compiled by Louis Wirth, and considerable material taken directly from the highly publicized trial of a Chicago black man named Robert Nixon. Nixon was eventually convicted and electrocuted for murdering a woman with a brick, and at one point, he was defended by the leftist International Labor Defense, but Wright made most use of the sensational, racist media coverage of the Nixon trial.
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