Major's collection of essays ["The Dark and Feeling"] is devoted to detailing the failures of the critics who have been unable to muddle through all the ideological warfare involved [in understanding black literature]. (You know, the old question of whether a white critic can really understand what he reads and whether black writers have some moral imperative to use their work as a forum of one kind or another.) Because black literature has unfortunately been welded to social and political issues, especially during the 1960s when we witnessed a proliferation of published black writers, many serious critics have been reluctant to write about it or, even worse, have been duped into considering only the socio-political implications of such work.

In the absence of useful criticism, writers like Major have been driven to do what the professional critics have failed to do. They have had to begin establishing the criteria on which their work should be judged. And this is what Major attempts to do. He offers some very worthwhile biographical sketches and critical perspectives on such diverse writers as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, John A. Williams and the Chicago writers Willard Motley and Frank London Brown.

Other essays in the volume are less satisfying. Major includes a few short book reviews which, because of their brevity, are rather superficial. Another essay on "The Explosion of Black Poetry" affords some sense of the amount of poetry being written but is rather uninforming about its quality or even exactly what it's like.

But these weaker pieces are more than balanced by the others. If one is weary of the usual criticism that surrounds black literature, this book is the perfect antidote. It offers some long overdue insights into the position of the black writer, even in these liberated times, in America.