Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Baldwin, James (Vol. 17) - Daniel Stern

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DANIEL STERN

Going to Meet the Man, Baldwin's first collection of short stories, is closer in spirit, tone, and achievement to his best critical work than it is to his "sensational" fiction. These are stories beautifully made to frame genuine experience in a lyrical language. They are, for the most part, free from the intellectual sin of confusing the Negro's (and/or the white man's) tragedy with the homosexual's psychic deformity. They sing with truth dug out from pain….

The stories in Going to Meet the Man demonstrate with stunning effect that James Baldwin has no need of racial or sexual special pleading. Free of these, at his best he is a rare creature.

Daniel Stern, "A Special Corner on Truth," in Saturday Review (© 1965 by Saturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. XLVIII, No. 45, November 6, 1965, p. 32.

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1. Introduction
2. Harvey Curtis Webster
3. Anthony West
4. Langston Hughes
5. David Karp
6. William Esty
7. Irving Howe
8. Donald Malcolm
9. Dan Jacobson
10. James Finn
11. Paul Goodman
12. Saul Maloff
13. Edgar Z. Friedenberg
14. James Finn
15. Garry Wills
16. Stephen Spender
17. COLIN MacINNES
18. David Levin
19. Howard Taubman
20. Philip Roth
21. C. B. COX and A. R. JONES
22. Karl Miller
23. Robert Brustein
24. Robert A. Bone
25. Howard Taubman
26. Edward A. Watson
27. Daniel Stern
28. Stephen Donadio
29. C.W.E. Bigsby
30. John Thompson
31. Mario Puzo
32. Richard Gilman
33. Brian Lee
34. Mike Thel Well
35. Walter Meserve
36. Charles Deemer
37. Anthony Bailey
38. Bruce Cook
39. JOHN McCLUSKEY
40. John Simon
41. Eric Rhode
42. Frederic Raphael
43. Edmund White
44. John Romano
45. Stanley Crouch
46. Margo Jefferson
47. Richard Gilman
48. Whitney Balliet
49. Darryl Pinckney
50. Copyright