Black Boys and Native Sons

James Baldwin first came to the notice of the American literary public not through his own fiction but as author of an impassioned criticism of the conventional Negro novel. In 1949 he published in Partisan Review an essay called “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” attacking the kind of fiction, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Native Son, that had been written about the ordeal of the American Negroes; and two years later he printed in the same magazine “Many Thousands Gone,” a tougher and more explicit polemic against Richard Wright and the school of naturalistic “protest” fiction that Wright represented. The protest novel, wrote Baldwin, is undertaken out of sympathy for the ...