Notes of a Native Son is best understood as the work of a young writer searching for an identity and struggling to reconcile the contradictory impulses that define his experiences as a black man, as an American, and as a writer. The essays are uneven, largely because Baldwin had not yet found his voice, and, as he himself admitted in his 1984 introduction, there was much that he was “trying to avoid.” The three pieces describing his personal experiences—“Notes of a Native Son,” “Equal in Paris,” and “Stranger in the Village”—have justifiably received the most praise. They have a stylistic clarity, intellectual force, and emotional honesty that some of the earlier essays lack. To some extent, Baldwin resented the way he was expected to explain the black experience to a white audience, and his writing sometimes reflects an incompletely resolved struggle to free himself from the limits of conventional social analysis. For example, the essays in part 1 seem artificially detached and overly intellectualized, as though they were the products of repressed anger and confused emotion. Nevertheless, the essays in Notes of a Native Son constitute one of the most thoughtful explorations of the black experience in American literature.

Throughout his career, Baldwin insisted that writers needed literary traditions that enabled them to probe beneath the surface of life and take the full measure of any individual’s joy or grief. Unfortunately, he found that the only traditions available to black writers falsified reality by reducing blacks to abstractions. Preferring psychological complexity to political propaganda, Baldwin clearly rejected the social protest novel as an inadequate literary form.

That in turn led to his harsh rejection of the work of Richard Wright in “Many Thousands Gone,” which has provoked more controversy than any other essay in the book. It is important to realize that Wright was not only the most celebrated black American novelist but also a kind of literary father figure for Baldwin. Wright had encouraged Baldwin, had helped him to win fellowships, and was the inspiration behind Baldwin’s move to Paris. Baldwin’s attack on Wright put a permanent end to their friendship. As he later admitted in several interviews, Baldwin was engaged in a symbolic act of rebellion akin to the psychological process in which the growing child frees himself from his father’s control in order to establish his own identity.

Many critics have complained that Baldwin’s attack on Wright was unfair, and a few have even defended Stowe from the charges leveled in “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” The essays in part 1 are vulnerable as analyses of specific works, but they achieve more validity when regarded as the literary manifestos of a young writer attempting to pinpoint the pitfalls and obstacles blocking the roads of all aspiring black authors. Baldwin warns that a political agenda can undermine the artistic integrity of a literary work and deprive it of psychological complexity. In this respect, Baldwin’s most important insight is that American culture insidiously finds means to avoid or distort the reality of race and racism. Even a work that appears to protest social injustice can be tainted by an underlying “theology” in which “black is the color of damnation.”

Although he engages in social analysis, Baldwin expresses a clear distrust of all political and sociological solutions. Instead, his primary concern is with the black man’s need to achieve some kind of personal moral triumph that enables him to accept a brutal reality without being brutalized or dehumanized by that act of acceptance. The essays in part 2 provide a compelling portrait of the frustrations of black life, but they are less...