A Window on Negro Intellectuals

...This collection should not be thought of as inclusive: one will search in vain for such novelists as Mark Kennedy, Julian Mayfield, William Kelley...

...These selections alone would make the book worthwhile...

...of Ted Poston, who recounts most wittily how his elders handled "The Birth of a Nation" when it came to Hopkinsville, Kentucky...

...Although at one time they were presumably personal communications, in print they are suffused with a public portentousness which approaches, dare one add?, pomposity...

...Clair Drake, a funny reminiscence of a group of young Negroes adrift in Russia during the depression by Langston Hughes, and some touching descriptions of Negroes adrift in Paris from the late Richard Wright's unfinished novel, in which that fine writer's tragic force still flickers...

...And since nothing else available is nearly as comprehensive, it is going to have to be consulted by anyone seriously concerned with cultural developments among American Negroes in the 1960's, the most crucial decade since Emancipation...

...But there are also a most revealing account of a visit with Sinclair Lewis by Horace R. Cayton, a first-rate discussion of "negritude" by St...

...In consequence, the curious will find here, in addition to a sheaf of poems (some very good, some quite bad) and fiction (ditto) by more or less familiar hands, the reflections of sociologists, lawyers, historians, playwrights, journalists, choreographers, on such matters as racism in scholarship and racialism in poetry, growing up in the South and coming of age in the Midwest, literature in politics and politics in literature...

...Altogether not merely a readable but a valuable book...

...There is more unintended pathos in this than in a dozen pieces of high-minded fiction...

...and of Katherine Dunham, who turns to the third person in "The Creek" (taken from her autobiography, A Touch of Innocence) to describe with compassion and power her lonely father's sexual yearning for his confused adolescent daughter...

...New Writing by American Negroes, 1940-1962...

...There are, too, a group of letters written by James Baldwin to his agent from such places as Israel and Turkey, in which the most celebrated Negro writer of our day discloses—perhaps more than he himself realizes—how his notion of himself has altered, and how even the most self-aware Negro writer in his position can no longer be simply an essayist, but must become willynilly a public figure...

...For once, the dust jacket copy hits it on the nose when it characterizes this book as one which "opens a window on the world of the Negro intellectual in the United States today...

...or such journalists as Gordon Parks and Carl Rowan...

...Nor should it be regarded simply as a "literary" anthology...

...For unexplained reasons Herbert Hill of the NAACP, who contributes a helpful introduction, has chosen to group under the fiction category the memoirs of Pauli Murray, who in an excerpt from Proud Shoes, tells the extraordinarily moving story of her white great-grandfather and Negro great-grandmother...