Baldwin, James (Vol. 17) - Whitney Balliet

WHITNEY BALLIET

The novelistic walls of "Just Above My Head" bulge and leak. But the form Baldwin chooses to write in no longer matters. His great and peculiar power is to re-create the maddening halfway house that the black man finds himself in in late-twentieth-century America. Baldwin is a prophet, a master of exhortation. Only weariness makes his voice crack. (p. 219)

Whitney Balliet, "Father and Son," in The New Yorker (© 1979 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LV, No. 41. November 26, 1979, pp. 218-19.

[The entire page is 96 words long]

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