At the height of the civil rights movement, when many were singing "We Shall Overcome," Lathen was writing Death Shall Overcome. This circumstance comments on both the inclusion of social concerns and the attitudes toward those concerns in this and other Lathen novels. Like other of the novels, Death Shall Overcome is topical, and like the generality of novels in the classic subgenre to which it belongs, this novel states a position of detached moderation toward the pressures of energetic social movement. On the one hand, the novel tells of attempts to install Edward Parry as the first black to occupy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange over the objections of a "lunatic fringe" of white racist brokers. On the other hand, the book relates the machinations of radical black leaders who seem to want to exploit the impasse for their own political ends...