Julian Mayfield, since 1978 a writer-in-residence in the Department of English at Howard University, has had a varied, colorful, and unusual career as novelist, playwright, critical essayist, university teacher, Broadway and Hollywood actor, journalist, and adviser to the leaders of two Third-World governments, the late Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Prime Minister Forbes Burnham of Guyana. This variety of experience has enabled him--almost compelled him--for more than thirty years to articulate and interpret the black experience through an interesting array of media. Though he has changed the literary milieu and even the philosophical reach and direction that his first published works took, his literary reputation is still firmly based on his first two novels, The Hit (1957) and The Long Night (1958), in both of which he admits that he "tried to create a melody rather than a symphony." In these works he became a significant part of a literary tradition...