Notes of a Native Son remains, in my opinion, Mr. Baldwin's best book, either in fiction or non-fiction: it is more complex and more forceful than any of the others, more inward with the experience it seeks to describe and at the same time more detached from it. (p. 497)

We hear too often in these essays the voice of his will rather than the voice of his sensibility; there are too many examples of rhetoric, of exhortation, of uplift, of reproach, in the book, and they undoubtedly weaken the impact it makes. But the moral to be drawn from these faults is not at all that writers should eschew the political struggles into which their own deepest inclinations draw them. Anyone who might be inclined to draw that moral should try to imagine what the consequences to his work would have been if Mr. Baldwin, feeling as he does, had denied his own deep impulsions, and had turned away from the public struggle, in order to protect his "art." (p. 498)

In nothing is Mr. Baldwin more of an American, and more of an American Negro, than the reluctance with which he discusses questions of power. Reluctance may seem an odd word to use about someone who at a certain point writes of himself: "Well, I know how power works, it has worked on me, and if I didn't know how power worked, I would be dead." But Mr. Baldwin makes my case, indirectly, when he goes on to say, "I have simply never been able to afford myself any illusions concerning the manipulation of that power." For what he is confessing here is that for a Negro the exercise of direct political and economic power appears to be all but unattainable. And it is at this very point, I feel, that the weaknesses of Mr. Baldwin's writing tend to reveal themselves. Instead of analyzing the consequences of Negro powerlessness, or speculating about the kinds of power they may hope to win for themselves, he too frequently contents himself with making moral appeals, or with issuing warnings. (p. 500)

Mr. Baldwin should tell us what he imagines those "extreme and unlucky repercussions" might be, within himself and among American Negroes [if the effort to repress Negroes continues]—leaving aside, for the moment, what they may be among the colored nations of the world. This is not a small thing to ask; for what it presupposes is that, having so little effective power locally, the militant American Negroes, for all the determination and self-restraint they have so far shown, may yet fail to achieve their ends, and that Mr. Baldwin's hopes for "a country in which there are no minorities—for the first time in the history of the world" may remain illusory. (pp. 500-01)

However, the burden of further self-scrutiny does not rest upon Mr. Baldwin alone, for the effect of reading his book must be to make anyone who thinks of himself as a liberal reflect more deeply upon the nature and the conditions of his own liberalism. (p. 501)