Mr Baldwin's enlistment in the cause of Civil Rights was bound to change his writings. It seems he has sacrificed them, or some of their resources…. His earlier essays were rich and good. But the intermittently powerful rhetoric of last year's The Fire Next Time—a fire kindled, it's the kind of thing that happens with such documents, in the asbestos pages of the New Yorker—has become the brutal and unqualified rhetoric of the present essay [Nothing Personal].

No one who visited America before the drive for Civil Rights properly began will doubt that there were decent people there whose lives were virtually unaffected by the racial situation…. Mr Baldwin should not pretend that such people don't exist. Nor are they any worse than people in other countries, where, equally, innocence is ignorance, and where there are comparable guilts and offences. According to Mr Baldwin, the American experience is corrupt and predatory, with trivial exceptions; and has been so since the first white foot was planted on the continent. No one smiles. No one sings. There are no lovers. If it were easy to suppose, as he must surely do, that what he says here will help the Negroes, this extravagance would not matter much. As it is, the essay may inflame a bookish and converted few, but as a piece of propaganda it's more like a piece of exhibitionism.

Mr Baldwin's recent essays can be very portentous, leaning on the clichés of the rostrum and of the literary article. The vein is the academic-apocalyptic, the kind of style in which it is possible to assert that whole classes or communities are contemptible or dead…. Not the least painful feature of the race situation in America is that a gifted novelist should be brought to write like this. Mr Baldwin writes in a good cause, but it will be a happy day when such a prose will no longer seem to be required.