Author Rob Franklin Explores Race, Class and Belonging in Debut Novel ‘Great Black Hope’

Author Rob Franklin discussed his acclaimed debut novel Great Black Hope in an interview with France 24, describing a book that explores race, class, respectability and belonging through the story of a young Black man from a Southern bourgeois family.

Franklin said he set out to write about worlds he had observed for years since childhood, particularly how class and race shape even the most intimate relationships between people.

A story of access and exclusion

At the center of the novel is David Smith, a young Black man whose education, manners and social connections grant him access to elite spaces, but who remains constantly aware of the possibility of being cast out of them.

That tension, Franklin said, led him to think deeply about respectability politics and the psychological toll of continually performing a version of oneself deemed acceptable by others. He described the pursuit of belonging in such circumstances as something that can become corrosive, eating at a person from the inside.

The interview, part of France 24’s cultural programming, situates Great Black Hope within a broader literary conversation about identity, class mobility and the personal costs of navigating spaces not built with people like its protagonist in mind.