Sonny's Blues | Literary Precedents
When asked in interviews about his formative influences and literary forebears, Baldwin has claimed a debt to many nineteenth and twentieth-century authors—Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Faulkner among them. Certainly the social issues which concerned the realist writers of the past century—particularly the degradations faced by the urban poor and the oppressive environment which inhibits creative and intellectual growth—resonate in Baldwin's work, while Faulkner's representations of race relations, if not necessarily his modernist formal techniques, have informed Baldwin's...
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