July 14 1963: 16

‘Harlem finds a voice’, Nigel Dennis

Nigel Dennis reviews The Fire Next Time: ‘To one who has not read Mr Baldwin’s novels TFNT comes as an astonishing surprise. It is not one polemic but two…Anybody accustomed to the grieved, injured, usually badly written books that appear against the colour-bar will know as soon as they open Mr Baldwin’s book that those sluggish days are over. Here, at last, is a full-sized champion’.