In this article Wertham attempts to fill what he feels as a gap in the application of psychoanalytic knowledge to works of art. In trying to arrive at valid conclusions through access to the living author, he takes Richard Wright and his novel Native Son, attempting to determine the derivation of certain elements in the novel. He of course meets the difficulty of obligation to discretion about personal matters so that the results of the investigation can be communicated only fragmentarily. Wertham does not describe the exact technique he used, but in a kind of analytic investigation memories were revived which showed that the key scene in Native Son, the unintentional killing of Mary Dalton by Bigger Thomas in the presence of her blind mother, is based on childhood experiences, the memory of which was not available to the writer before analytic measures were used. The name 'Dalton' of the victim could be traced back to 'Daltonism', a term used for color blindness. This interesting little article proves the unconscious determination of theme and elaboration in works of art.