Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is writing for the screen again. She’s penning an adaptation of Richard Wright’s influential 1940 novel “Native Son,” Flavorwire reports. Visual artist Rashid Johnson is helming the project.
The first best-selling novel by a black author in America, “Native Son” centers on Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in poverty in Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s. The 20-year-old accepts a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family whose patriarch is the landlord of Bigger’s building. The book tackles racism, class, and the hypocrisy of the justice system.
Johnson said he originally read the book in his teens, but returned to it in his 30s. “It just stayed on my mind,” he explained, “the idea of an incredibly complicated black character and investigating his incredibly difficult… circumstances in a world that was also kind of pitted against him.”
Parks is the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. She won in 2002 for writing “Topdog/Underdog.” Her other stage credits include “365 Days/365 Plays,” “The Book of Grace,” and “In the Blood.”
“Native Son” won’t mark Parks’ first time writing for the screen. She previously penned a 2005 Emmy-nominated TV movie adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” starring Halle Berry, and “Girl 6,” a 1996 Spike Lee dramedy about an aspiring actress who becomes a sex phone operator to pay the bills.
