Mr. Baldwin [in "Nobody Knows My Name"] proves to be a steady and exact observer of himself and of others. He also qualifies eminently as a person for whom our society has not troubled to provide an identifying niche. In evidence of this, it is enough to say that he couples an uncomfortably acute intelligence with a measure of personal pride and that he is a Negro.
For convenience, we might divide Mr. Baldwin's essays into two heaps. The larger heap will contain his observations on a number of particular events that illuminate the peculiar situation of the Negro in a white world…. Their relation to the author's search for identity often is not an intimate one, but he argues for their inclusion on the ground that "the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self." And certainly no reader would wish them deleted, for the irrelevant but adequate reason that they are splendid works of reporting and argument. The second and smaller heap of essays will contain Mr. Baldwin's direct assaults on the problem of identity. In them, observation and argument give place to analysis of states of mind. They are, so to speak, attempts to sketch his own mental landscape by way of getting his bearings in the world. And they also are, on the whole, so much less successful than our first batch of essays that they might be the work of a different pen….
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