In spite of all that has been written about the Negro in America in the last decade or so, I think there is no more lucid, revealing and corruscating record than [Notes of a Native Son]. The intensity of feeling is matched by the brilliance of the thought, and it is difficult to grasp the moral effort that must have been required to bring to the surface, to place under the harsh light of critical examination, things that both black and white have for so long kept buried deep. (pp. 113-14)

Another Country is a novel whose parts are more successful than the whole, and the achievement in these parts is of such a high order and of such particularity that we will not, I think, find their counterpart in American writing.

The first section of the novel, which is devoted primarily to Rufus, could stand as a complete short work. Rufus, much of whose value we are asked to take on trust, is gradually worn down and destroyed by forces that he cannot totally comprehend, nor can the reader—though he may recognize them as familiar—for they flow from no single identifiable source. But Rufus exists as a person, the forces that destroy him are palpable, and the grotesque and terrible prayer that is wrenched from him when he plunges to his death reverberates.

There are other passages where Baldwin is equal to his intentions…. And those are enough, not entirely to save the book but to make it more interesting and more rewarding than the "great" new works held up for universal admiration with such implacable regularity. (p. 115)

While any evaluation of Baldwin as a writer must consider both his essays and his novels, it is, hopefully, for the latter that he will be remembered. Since the essays, for the most part, deal with contemporary problems, they will become historical; that is, again hopefully, they will cease to apply to current situations. Yet it is partly on the basis of the essays that one has faith in his value as a novelist, for some of the resources on which he must draw are revealed most sharply in the essays. What seems to be the case is that Baldwin has yet to find the artistic form that will reveal the mystery, that will uncover the truth he knows is there. If he does, if his intention and accomplishment become one, if his intellectual grasp is matched by his imaginative, he will be a writer whose measure it will be difficult to take. (p. 116)