The world is a huge gleaming marble, an unblemished arc of piercing blue. Here facing the lake as I am. The more muted colors of the water lap at the sand, all that blue, it stretches on and on to some distant place...

"Good heavens, this woman takes a long time to make her confession," the girl thought and shuddered. "This priest is likely to ask me a lot of questions, too. Just what I need though. A good scolding. Otherwise, in a few-days ** be...

In the following excerpt, Ro discusses the intellectual and philosophical influences on Baldwin at the time he wrote "Sonny's Blues," examining in particular the ways in which the story reflects the existential philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Ro also situates this and other examples of Baldwin's work in the larger context of African-American literature in the pre- and post-Civil Rights eras, suggesting that Baldwin's strategy for writing about the human...

In the following essay, Tsomondo compares Baldwin's and Charles Mungoshi's view of history as evinced in "Sonny's Blues " and Waiting for the Rain.

In the following essay, Williams analyzes the figure of the musician in African-American literature, concluding that in Baldwin's fiction it functions as "the embodiment of alienation and estrangement, which the figure of the artist becomes in much of twentieth century literature."