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James Baldwin (Critical Survey of Long Fiction)

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Before he published his first novel, James Baldwin had established a reputation as a talented essayist and reviewer. Many of his early pieces, later collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961), have become classics; his essays on Richard Wright, especially “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and “Many Thousands Gone” (1951), occupy a central position in the development of “universalist” African American thought during the 1950’s. Culminating in The Fire Next Time...

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