"If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one."
--Michael Ondaatje "A young American involved with both a woman and a man. . . . Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity."
--The New York Times "Absorbing . . . [with] immediate emotional impact."
--The Washington Post
"Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint."
--Saturday Review "Exciting ... a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction."
--The Atlantic
"Violent, excruciating beauty."
--San Francisco Chronicle "To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, America, the Negro, the white man --to be forced to understand so much."
--Alfred Kazin "This author retains a place in an extremely select group; that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers."
--Saturday Review "He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being --which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer."
--The Nation "He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing . . . the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought." --
Langston Hughes "He has become one of the few writers of our time." --
Norman Mailer
