In the preface to his 1968 publication of The Amen Corner (produced 1955), James Baldwin comments, in typically forthright fashion, that at the time of writing the play--in the early beginnings of his formation as not only the most significant African American playwright of his time but also as one of the leading figures in American literature since Ralph Waldo Emerson--he "didn't have any ambition to conquer the theatre." Biographers and critics alike generally agree that the many novels and essays written from the 1940s to the 1980s, which comprise Baldwin's articulation of a radical social realism and a metaphysics of individual struggle toward critical consciousness, are what have established his considerable reputation. From his 1953 sociopolitical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain to his final essays in Playboy and other magazines, which demonstrate Baldwin's indomitable desire to face himself as he hoped both black and white America could face...