To many people who read his work casually, William Stanley Braithwaite could and does seem to be something of a baffling and self-deluded enigma. A black American born in Boston of moderately well-to-do West Indian parents, he quite deliberately published three volumes of poems which consciously and even conscientiously avoided mention of race or of black experiences. Largely self-educated, he nevertheless so taught himself that he became acknowledged as one of the most widely read and authoritative American literary critics and anthologists of the first several decades of the twentieth century, and indeed, he shares with Harriet Monroe, the founder and first editor of Poetry magazine, much of the credit for bullying and cajoling American readers into accepting modern and unconventional writings. A conservative and conventional writer himself, he was more open than most of his contemporaries to the unusual and the experimental and played an important role...