3721 (South) Indiana Avenue, Chicago, IL: Home of Bigger Thomas
4605 (South) Drexel Boulevard, Chicago, IL: The Dalton Household
Photos from Google Maps (couldn't get my parents to drive me to the actual addresses!)
Im assuming that the actual houses/apartments that Richard Wright wrote of were fictional but seeing the locations makes the whole book seem more real. Hope you found this interesting!
This is an interesting post, Iulianna! These photographs are actually quite similar to what I pictured in my mind while reading the book (without all the modern cars, of course, and with snow covering the ground). It's definitely cool to see these locations (even if Wright wasn't thinking more specifically than the general neighborhoods when he chose the addresses). It's almost as though Bigger's story is somehow historical -- I felt that way during the book, especially during book three, that such an event had really occurred (the author points out that, as he was in the process of writing Native Son, a very similar event did unfold in Chicago!) The scenario in Native Son is fictional, but we could easily visit places like these, point to buildings and read newspaper clippings that show us Bigger, in one form or another, was indeed real (and most likely is still real today).
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