Reading Down Second Avenue and The Wanderers, one finds it easy to understand why the author, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and his books are banned in his native South Africa. Down Second Avenue is autobiography which covers Mphahlele's life down to his flight into exile in 1957….

From the pen of another, less talented, less sensitive writer, Down Second Avenue could easily have become a sociological analysis of apartheid and/or a psychological explication of the effects of this "political" system upon its victims, black, white, colored and Indian. It is neither. One is made sharply aware of the operating sociological and psychological phenomena, not by the explication of them, but by the development of real life situations and especially by the presentation of striking real life characters…. (p. 78)

But it is impossible to do critical justice to a book that, while it meets the universally recognized literary canons, is at...