Mr. Baldwin's first novel ["Go Tell It on the Mountain"] is written as skilfully as many a man's fifth essay in fiction. His handling of the flashbacks so that they show the past without interrupting the drama of the present is masterful. His penetration of the mind of John, especially in the scene of his conversion, is as valid as anything in William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience" and as moving as the interior monologues in [William] Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying." Although Mr. Baldwin does not have either [Richard] Wright's or [Ralph] Ellison's capacity to take all modern problems as his province, he never descends into the provincialism that has made so many Negro novels read like footnotes to [Gunnar] Myrdal's "An American Dilemma." "Go Tell It on the Mountain" fulfils a great deal, promises more.

Harvey Curtis Webster, "Community of Pride," in The Saturday Review (copyright...