A decade ago James Baldwin, more than any other author, seemed to liberal white Americans to personify as well as to articulate the outrage and anguish of black Americans struggling to put an end to racial oppression and to achieve their civil and human rights…. Though as Northern as Martin Luther King was Southern, James Baldwin preached a more secular and apocalyptic but not really dissimilar sermon: the redemptive force of the love of a prophetic, interracial few could, even at that late date, yet prevail over the bigotry of the white majority, and so "end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world." If these brave words today seem both naïve and anachronistic, the reason is partly the nation's recent habit of giving more publicity than credence to its seers, of lavishing attention while withholding belief. (p. 1)

A proper understanding of Baldwin and his work must take into account a complicated amalgam of psychological and social elements sometimes thought to be antithetical. If, like most major black writers, Baldwin has extracted from his private ordeal the symbolic outline of his race's suffering, he has done so without obscuring the uniqueness of his personal experience. (p. 2)

However much he may revile the historical role of Christianity in the enslavement of black people, The Fire Next Time attests that [Baldwin] has never forgotten the compensatory values of his [adolescent] religious experience: "In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare." And for good or ill, Baldwin's work is of a kind in which the didactic—even homiletic—element is of the essence. (p. 3)

Out of Baldwin's experience have emerged certain recurring themes in his writing, the most important of which is the quest for love. On a personal level, the search is for the emotional security of a love of which the protagonist has always been deprived. In his brilliant first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, the theme develops with autobiographical clarity, as is also the case in the related short story "The Outing" or such essays as "Notes of a Native Son," "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy," "Down at the Cross," and "No Name in the Street." But elsewhere the search for love is equally imperative. David finds it in Giovanni's Room but loses it again because of his failure to commit himself totally. The interracial and bisexual bed-hopping of Another Country constitutes a frenzied effort to realize love in the loveless city of New York. It falls to Leo Proudhammer of Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone to articulate the poignant paradox of Baldwin's love theme: "Everyone wishes to be loved, but, in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it." If the search for love has its origin in the desire of a child for emotional security, its arena is an adult world which involves it in struggle and pain. Stasis must yield to motion, innocence to experience, security to risk. This is the lesson that the black Ida inculcates in her white lover Vivaldo in Another Country, and it saves Baldwin's central fictional theme from sentimentality.

Similarly, love as an agent of racial reconciliation and national survival is not for Baldwin a vague yearning for an innocuous brotherhood, but an agonized confrontation with reality, leading to the struggle to transform it. It is a quest for truth through a recognition of the primacy of suffering and injustice in the American past. In racial terms, the black man as victim of this past is in a moral position to induce the white man, the oppressor, to end his self-delusion and begin the process of regeneration…. Baldwin wrote in 1962 in "My Dungeon Shook," ["This] is what [integration] means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it." By 1972, the year of No Name in the Street, the redemptive possibilities of love seemed exhausted in that terrible decade of assassination, riot, and repression, of the Black Panthers and Attica. Social love had now become for Baldwin more a rueful memory than an alternative to disaster. Violence, he now believes, is the arbiter of history, and in its matrix the white world is dying and the third world is struggling to be born. In his fiction, too, this shift in emphasis is apparent. Though love may still be a sustaining personal force, its social utility is dubious. (pp. 5-6)

Whether through the agency of love or violence, Baldwin is almost obsessively concerned with the writer's responsibility to save the world. As an essayist, he assumes the burden not only of reporting with eloquent sensitivity his observations of reality, but also of tirelessly reminding us of the need to transform that reality if Armageddon is to be averted. Over and over he concludes an essay by enlarging the perspective to a global scale…. Introducing the theme of self-examination in Nobody Knows My Name, he asserts that "one can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours."… Two of the simplest expressions of his faith in the possibility of change are the concluding challenges of the speeches entitled "In Search of a Majority" and "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel": "The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in" and "We made the world we're living in and we have to make it over." Nobody Knows My Name concludes with an account of Baldwin's friendship with Norman Mailer, another writer who emphasizes the social value of the literary perspective: "For, though it clearly needs to be brought into focus, he has a real vision of ourselves as we are, and it cannot be too often repeated in this country now, that, where there is no vision, the people perish." The possibility of just such a perishing is pursued further in The Fire Next Time, and the possibility has become a probability in No Name in the Street, where Baldwin speaks of "the shape of the wrath to come" and the setting of the white man's sun. (pp. 6-7)

James Baldwin has always been concerned with the most personal and intimate areas of experience and also with the broadest questions of national and global destiny—and with the intricate interrelationships between the two. Whatever the final assessment of his literary achievement, it is clear that his voice—simultaneously that of victim, witness, and prophet—has been among the most urgent of our time. (p. 7)