Mr. Baldwin [in "Nobody Knows My Name"] proves to be a steady and exact observer of himself and of others. He also qualifies eminently as a person for whom our society has not troubled to provide an identifying niche. In evidence of this, it is enough to say that he couples an uncomfortably acute intelligence with a measure of personal pride and that he is a Negro.

For convenience, we might divide Mr. Baldwin's essays into two heaps. The larger heap will contain his observations on a number of particular events that illuminate the peculiar situation of the Negro in a white world…. Their relation to the author's search for identity often is not an intimate one, but he argues for their inclusion on the ground that "the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self." And certainly no reader would wish them deleted, for the irrelevant but adequate reason that they are splendid works of reporting and argument. The second and smaller heap of essays will contain Mr. Baldwin's direct assaults on the problem of identity. In them, observation and argument give place to analysis of states of mind. They are, so to speak, attempts to sketch his own mental landscape by way of getting his bearings in the world. And they also are, on the whole, so much less successful than our first batch of essays that they might be the work of a different pen….

The most conspicuous feature of these personal essays is the absence of a strong personal tone. It is not really a mental landscape that the reader descries but a vague amplitude of perplexities. (p. 233)

The light of his intelligence, when directed inward upon himself, seems to waver and fade. All sense of selection vanishes….

If his first heap of essays, those that deal largely with the question of color, deserve inclusion in the history of his search for identity, perhaps it is not, as he supposes, because these matters must be got out of the way before the search commences but because the clear stamp of his character is on every page. And a richly interesting character it proves to be. (p. 234)

He is a man who truly cherishes the values of Western civilization, and yet, as a Negro who is resident in a large, bright corner of that civilization, he suffers daily and personally from the most conspicuous transgression of those values. As an adherent to Western ideals, he must be tempted, at least occasionally, to take a broad, vague, patient view of American lapses. As a victim, he often must bitterly be tempted to declare those ideals humbug. In point of fact, he does neither. He simply and unanswerably insists that our values do us no good unless we put them into practice, and that there is nothing to be gained by pretending that they are practiced when obviously they are not. The pungent good sense of his social criticism is not easily to be matched…. (p. 236)

[If] his readers remain ignorant, with him, of his ultimate psychic essence, they can console themselves with the reflection that, whatever else he may be, he is an extremely valuable member of a small body of literary observers who write with vigor, sense, and utter candor about things that matter greatly to this country. (p. 238)