Anthony Arblaster, ‘James Baldwin Brings Naught for Your Comfort’,

Feb 28, 1964, Tribune, Volume 28, Issue 9, p. 12.

Lengthy review of Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name

‘Mr. Baldwin is seeking his own identity, seeking to know himself, and because he is an America Negro, born and bred in the ghetto of Harlem, this search is inextricably tied up with his struggles to resolve the problems that being an American Negro imposes on him. Mr. Baldwin knows that, as a writer, he deals with reality, and therefore must not allow himself the luxury of self-deception: […] it is, largely, by the severity and complete frankness of his self-examination that he uncovers the realities of the colour problem, destroying as goes so many of the illusions with which white men, especially white liberals, protect themselves from the full ugliness of the truth’.