This collection of essays on Richard Wright’s Native Son developed from a research-oriented, upper- division University of North Texas Honors College course, spring 2015. It contains the following seven chapters: Chapter I: The Cognitive Dissonance of Bigger Thomas (by Rachel Martinez) Chapter II: The Equal of Them: Violence and Equality in Native Son and “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” (by Molly Riddell) Chapter III: Above the Sceptered Sway: Holy Justice, and the Trials of Bigger and Shylock (by Alberto Puras) Chapter IV: Through His Eyes: Critical Analysis of Wright’s Native Son and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (by Rachel Torres) Chapter V: Perceptual Misadventure: Becoming Rather than Enacting the Stereotype in Wright’s Native Son and Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (by Stormie Garza) Chapter VI: Psychologically Rather than Physically Dismembered: Reconsideration of Self-conception in Native Son and Moby-Dick (by Yacine Ndiaye) Chapter VII: Specious Dialectic in Wright’s Native Son (by Nicholas Grotowski). The student authors have exhibited burgeoning skills as historical contextualists, mindful of the author’s times, social circumstance, personal reading, narrative point of view, and aesthetic achievement, evidenced by six of these essays having been accepted for presentation at the annual conference of the American Studies Association of Texas.