"Some people who are important to us as young people, wither under our gaze as older adults. And then other people who we know as genius somehow just increase in our estimation. Baldwin is among those people for me."
--Ta-Nehisi Coates
"Throughout his writing, Baldwin never shies away from a frank and disquieting acknowledgement of feelings." --
The Guardian "The wonderful thing about writers like Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages that are so arresting we become breathless and have to raise our eyes from the page to keep from being spirited away."
--Edward P. Jones, from his new introduction
"Written with bitter clarity and uncommon grace."
--Time "A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity."
--Langston Hughes,
The New York Times Book Review "He named for me the things you feel but couldn't utter . . . articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time."
--Henry Louis Gates Jr.
"I owe a tremendous debt to the example of his work."
--John Edgar Wideman
"Baldwin's vision, his humor, his tragically beautiful style, make this a book [to] . . . turn to for a long time."
--Kay Boyle,
The American Scholar
