There are several remarkable things about [Go Tell It on the Mountain], the most impressive of which is Baldwin's ability to make the experiences of the story immediate and definitive. He achieves this end through the use of his facile way with words and the oratorical flourish of the preacher. The immediacy is more strongly felt when we realize that Baldwin himself is preaching to us, not only in the way he knew as a boy preacher, but also as a persuasive writer reaching out to an audience. Also, his use of the flash-back technique without halting the action of the conversion is a formidable achievement especially for a first attempt in the novel. It would not be too much to compare Baldwin's success at narration with Conrad's success in Nostromo, though the latter is a far more ambitious and creative work. There is also the success of "sounding the sense" of the language of the novel; because the novel is about a religious experience, Baldwin's style moves with the poetic freedom of certain parts of the Old Testament and with the restraint of the New. His portrayal of the Negro is as honest as it is sympathetic, never falling to that type of sentimental bathos that characterizes so much of the description of Negroes in other stories. Baldwin's great mistake, however, was to believe that his characters could be regarded as Negroes "only incidentally." For the experiences of the novel are those of the Negro and cannot be confused with the experiences of any other racial group. That the characters appear Negro and act as Negroes is not a disadvantage and does not make the experiences less appealing. Baldwin wished to believe this. Because of this, I am led to believe that Baldwin had wanted to write about the Negro's American experience while, at the same time, he hoped to make the characters Everyman. His inability to understand the possibilities of such an endeavour suggests the first major problem that faced Baldwin as a writer. It seems to represent an inability to come to terms with his Negro-ness and with his obligations as a writer. One feels that he is not yet sure that the Negro experience is a valid one and he wishes to believe that as an author he can successfully objectify Negro experience to take on the garb of universality. Yet, there is no evidence of this dilemma in the novel; the roots of the struggle are within the man as Negro and artist. (pp. 386-87)

It seems evident [in Notes of a Native Son] that Baldwin is not merely criticizing the erroneous conceptions of the Negro held by white America, but also suggesting that Americans should make the past more meaningful to the present. For the past of the American Negro is inextricably tied to the past of white Americans and vice versa, and a knowledge of this fact will help all Americans to better understand their unique experience in the New World. I am suggesting here that there is far more to this volume of essays than a Negro's criticism of his country or of the racial conditions there. It is a plea from one man for Americans to accept the challenge that the ideal has imposed upon American history and American society; in short, it is the right for all Americans to be honestly and faithfully involved in the country's destiny. (p. 390)

The failure of Giovanni's Room introduces a problem that is central to the Negro writer in America: how successful can a story of fiction be when the characters created by the Negro author are non-Negro?… Giovanni's Room is not a failure because of the author's inability to make non-Negro characters come to life; it is a failure because of Baldwin's inability to trust his own experience in and with the white world. This resulted in the creation of characters too hollow and methodic to represent the experiences that he, Baldwin, did not understand or did not want to understand. It seems to me that this was the result of Baldwin's failure to understand his role as an author as apposed to that of a Negro author; again it is the conflict of identity, a conflict which is ultimately resolved in Nobody Knows My Name. (p. 392)

We sense [in Nobody Knows My Name] the emergence of a new James Baldwin, a man more certain of himself as a Negro, as an American, and as an author, and we are not disappointed to find that each essay is the personal manifestation of the author's growing awareness of those three facts combined. Each experience is an enlightenment for the man and fuel for his art. And although the essays are intensely personal, there is the widest implication of involving America with the rest of the world. (p. 393)

Nobody Knows My Name represents a two-fold achievement for James Baldwin. He had now attained a solidity of character that could no longer cause him to suffer illusions about himself and his country, and he had determined to dedicate himself to writing and to using the American experience to guide him. He realized that the determining of what the unwritten laws and assumptions of his society were offered tremendous possibilities for the writer….

Unlike Go Tell It on the Mountain, which deals specifically with a Negro experience, or Giovanni's Room, which examines the emotional relationships between three white persons, Another Country is a novel which explores several facets of life—love, marriage, sex, infidelity, writing, jazz, hope, joy, despair, degeneration, and death—through the intense relations of Negroes and whites in New York. The novel abounds with cross-currents of sexual and emotional attachments which, through kinship or sex, involve all the characters. The whole complex of relationships is competently handled by Baldwin. (p. 395)

Another Country may simply be categorized as a novel dealing with American Negro-white relationships. It is not a convincing novel because of the lack of any recognizable standards of value. Baldwin would like us to believe that New York, with its Harlem and its Greenwich Village, is typically the center of a disintegrating civilization, and that Rufus Scott is the symbol of suffering mankind. Rufus is not even the symbol of a suffering Negro; and here lies one of the great faults of the book, the characters are not typical Americans, and cannot be said to typify Negro-white relationships. For this reason we find that much of the dialogue between Ida and Vivaldo (symbol of the frustrated artist?) is unbelievably bitter and scathing. All of the characters try to "make it" in love and life, but they never succeed. And the shifting from bed to bed is merely indicative of the disintegration of the personalities involved in the total experience of the novel. The movement common to all of the characters involved is one of continuous deterioration…. [The] six characters live out their lives in hate and dishonesty, a dissipated waste in a dissipated New York.

Despite its shortcomings, there are several passages in the novel which attest Baldwin's stature as a writer. His description of the sex act is reminiscent of [D. H.] Lawrence, though there is none of Lawrence's penchant to make sex a spiritual clash of soul with soul. His detailed description of the Negro's complete involvement while playing or singing in the jazz medium is the best that I have read anywhere. Also, New York, especially Harlem, the country within a city, with its "destruction of nerves and sanity" achieves the nightmarish effect Baldwin so consciously strove to produce. But these beauties do not make Another Country a great novel…. One suspects that the "failure" of the book is its lack of typical characters in a wholly American experience; identification can hardly be made with atypical characters. And if, as Baldwin suggests elsewhere, a new sense of life's possibilities is inherent in the experiences of the New World, there is no evidence in Another Country that "life's possibilities" are attainable or even understandable. The writer, the novelist, the artist, sees in life not only what is negative but also that which is positive, and if he sees nothing positive either in the old order, the new order, or the order to come, then his perception must be suspected. The sordidness and the hatred in Another Country cannot be the whole vision, and the inability or disinclination to record the whole is a shortcoming on the author's part. (pp. 396-97)

He is more successful in provoking thought in his essays than he is in arousing emotion in fiction…. The fact that he was a successful preacher at the age of fourteen suggests part of the forcefulness of the rhetoric in Baldwin's essays. Here the language is more applicable to his subject matter and his figures of speech and digressions serve to illuminate the thought. Sometimes, however, his rhetorical devices creep into the novel and tend to halt the action rather than to elevate it. In Another Country Baldwin sometimes assumes the stand of the essayist, at which points the tendency is to mere sermonizing. The only truce for Baldwin now as an artist is his recognition of the fact that he is a powerful essayist and a mediocre novelist. (p. 397)

Baldwin, more than any other contemporary American writer, has worked consistently well with the essay as a particular form of literary expression. He has shown what can be done with the essay and how effective is its form to incorporate personal convictions on a variety of subjects. Despite the popularity of the novel today, Baldwin has reminded us that non-fictional works are always an integral part of any country's literature. Whether he will be remembered as an essayist or a novelist is not the great question; the question is, what more is needed for a Negro to be included in "the central community of American letters"? To say that Baldwin has shown only provincialism and has not concerned himself with the wider involvement of American life is false. That he has been erroneously dubbed a "leading civil rights spokesman" is merely another means of refusing to accept the man's art and the far-reaching implications of what it means to be a writer. (p. 401)