A little over 10 years ago I reviewed Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice [see excerpt above]…. I said then (and on rereading the book still think) that Cleaver was a gifted writer but one whose particular qualities of rage, resentment and quasimystical aspiration in a context of racial struggle put him outside many of our literary canons. The review led to an agitated discussion … in which I tried to refine and clarify the distinctions I had drawn in the first piece.

The chief one was between what I called writing of a more or less traditional kind that happened to be by blacks (or "Negroes" at the time; that usage still held sway) and writing of a political and ideological cast that was intended mainly as a source of morale for blacks. My point was that the former could and ought to be judged the way we judge any...