Building on the relational approach to engaged literature developed in the previous chapter, this chapter turns to Richard Wright’s bestselling novel Native Son to show how its impact is the making of an agency distributed within a constellation of actors, to which its blunt style and controversial main character belong as much as its author’s dovetailing publications. It argues that a certain unruliness was key to assembling this potent constellation of actors: In demanding of its author to give account of a life in which a person like its boldly unsympathetic protagonist is possible, the novel and its protagonist helped to launch a new, transgeneric and transmedial way of committed writing. Conversely, thinking about Native Son along these lines opens up new perspectives on the creative force of social engagement and its place in our accounts of how literature does what it does, and what some of it aspires to do.