In the following essay, Butler-Evans explores B ambara's attempt to synthesize African-American nationalist and feminist ideologies in her short stories.

In the following essay, Willis discusses the political nature of The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, The Salt Eaters, and Gorilla, My Love, noting Bambara's emphasis on the importance of community, individuality, and political and social activism.

In the following interview, Bambara discusses her writing philosophy and the ways in which being an African-American woman influences her work.

In the following essay, Hargrove lauds Bambara's portrayal of young characters in her first short fiction collection, maintaining that one of her "special gifts as a writer of fiction is her ability to portray with sensitivity and compassion the experiences of children from their point of view. "

Hargrove is an American educator and the author of works on T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. In the following essay, first published in 1983 in Southern Quarterly, she examines Bambara's focus on adolescence and youth in Gorilla, My Love.

An American educator, editor, nonfiction writer, and critic, Guy-Sheftall has served as director of the Women's Research and Resource Center at Spelman College. In the following interview, Bambara discusses her childhood, her work, and contemporary African-American women writers.

In the following essay, Stanford analyzes the relationship between Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Bambara's The Salt Eaters.

Hull is an American educator and critic who has written extensively on Black American literature and Black women writers. She coedited All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982) and wrote Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987). In the essay below, she offers a detailed thematic and stylistic analysis of The Salt Eaters.

Traylor is an American critic and educator. In the following essay, she examines Bambara's prose style, particularly its jazz-like characteristics.

Vertreace is an American poet, educator, editor, and author of children's books. In the following essay, she examines the theme of community in Bambara's short fiction.

In the following essay, Perkins discusses how the writings of Toni Cade Bambara address the exclusion of African American women both by Black men and white feminists.

In the following essay, Vertreace examines the themes of community and identity in Bambara's stories.

In the following essay, Burks analyzes the emphasis on communication and dialogue in Bambara's fiction, noting in particular the relationship Bambara sees between language and the Black freedom movement of the twentieth century.

In the following essay, Lyles explores the “revolutionary thrust” of the stories compiled in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive.

In the following essay, Lyles explores the role of revolution in Bambara's collection, maintaining that revolutionary thought "is manifested through the depiction of the characters' sense of time and through the prominence of descriptions of sound and motion."

In the following essay, Lyles discusses how Bambara's descriptions of sound and motion support the theme of revolution in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive.

In the following essay, Gidley discusses the narrative technique of "Raymond's Run."

Gidley is an English educator and critic who frequently writes about Native Americans. In the essay below, he discusses narrative perspective in "Raymond's Run."

In the following review, Chevigny offers a positive assessment of the stories comprising Gorilla, My Love.

In the following essay, Comfort considers the mythical allusion in Bambara's “Sweet Town.”

In the following positive review of The Salt Eaters, Shipley deems the novel "an unqualified success," concluding that Bambara's literary voice "has refused to be tranquilized into slumber but will share with all women the quality of pain and despair."

In the following review, Deck contends that Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions “confirms what we already know about Bambara’s artistry and informs us on personal and political matters that allow us to better understand what she saw as her mission.”

In the following preface to Bambara's posthumous collection of essays and short fiction, Morrison praises her talent as a writer and offers personal reminiscences of the author.

In the following excerpt, McRobbie praises Gorilla, My Love for its political focus, poetic aspects, and its accurate representations of African-American culture.

Jackson is an American poet, short story writer, and dramatist. Below, she offers a highly favorable assessment of The Salt Eaters.

The stories [in "Gorilla, My Love" and "The Sea Birds Are Still Alive"], describing the lives of black people in the North and the South, could be more exactly typed as vignettes and significant anecdotes, although a few of them are fairly long. Some of them are shapelier than others, steadier in tone, more compact; all are notable for their purposefulness, a more or less explicit inspirational angle, and a distinctive motion of the prose, which swings from colloquial narrative t...

In her highly acclaimed fiction …, [Toni Cade Bambara] emphasizes the necessity for black people to maintain their best traditions, to remain healthy and whole as they struggle for political power. "The Salt Eaters," her first novel, eloquently summarizes and extends the abiding concerns of her previous work. The central action of the novel is the healing of Velma Henry, an attempted suicide….

In the following review, Cookson provides a laudatory assessment of Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions.

[In The Salt Eaters] a black woman is sitting on a stool in a hospital, watching numbly as a fabled healer named Minnie Ransom attempts to bring her out of her depression, or her mental collapse, or perhaps it's simply overwhelming tiredness—whatever led her to slit her own wrists and try to gas herself. As Minnie Ransom hums and flounces her dress and drapes her shawl, as Velma Henry sits frozen in her white gown, scenes from the past and present swim by in no particular order. One scene fade...

[In "Gorilla, My Love" Toni Cade Bambara] takes time for a wide range of black relationships at home and in the neighborhood and for the discovery of complexity in black unity. It is interesting that none of these … [stories] center on relations between black men and women (though in two, women deal with separation from their lovers). The characters of whom she writes most often and with the greatest tenderness and subtle invention are adolescents and old people, mostly female. It is as...

Bambara backs readers [of The Salt Eaters] into the eye of a hurricane and then releases them, along with her troubled protagonist, as the contaminated clouds burst. The ominous downpour is the plot's core event and metaphor; the book is heavy on atmosphere and thin on action. But that bias seems appropriate to the characters' pillar-of-salt paralysis in which memory of past violence numbs the present and urges fear of the future. Details are microcosmic: The souring of a marriage is reflected...

In "The Sea Birds Are Still Alive: Collected Stories" Toni Cade Bambara … tries to avoid narcissistic stereotypes. Reading her stories is like coming into a crowded, hot, smoky room where a dozen different voices (most of them speaking Black English) are telling a dozen disparate tales. Some of the stories fail just because there is too much verbal energy, too much restless pursuit of random anecdote. But the fine title story (set in Vietnam), on the other hand, makes its meaning felt j...

[The fifteen stories in Gorilla, My Love] are among the best portraits of black life to have appeared in some time. Written in a breezy, engaging style that owes a good deal to street dialect, they are concerned primarily with children and manage to incorporate the virtues of such stories—zest and charm—yet avoid most of the sentimental pratfalls. Moreover, they have resonance: their anger is a knife slicing through the entertainment, and it continues to cut when the stories are over. Bambara&...

Miss Bambara writes with a marvelous vitality; her style, which draws its bite and verve from everyday black speech, comes close to poetry. But if you want to give [The Sea Birds Are Still Alive] the attention it deserves, you ought to wait a week between stories. Taken as a group, they seem too dense and clamorous. Taken one by one, they positively sing. Anne Tyler, "Farewell to the Story as Imperiled Species," in The National Observer (reprinted by permission of The National Obs...