[Maya Angelou begins Gather Together In My Name] with a brief history of Black American thought and culture after the second World War; it is not a precise history, certainly not history as viewed coolly and through statistics. It is not even "accurate," but viewed from the vantage of almost 30 years, as one might hear it on the streets: biased, authoritative, hip, almost wildly funny, like certain urban myths. It seems right, and if this is not history as it was, it is history as it should have been.

In many ways, autobiography is the most demanding fiction, and few can, à la Chester Himes' The Quality of Hurt, whip the form into anything more appreciable than the cotton candy of a life that might have been anyone's. Richard Wright succeeded with Black Boy because he approached it as fiction. (p. 52)

Maya Angelou is not the stylist that Himes...