SOURCE: "The Black Musician as Literary Hero: Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues' and Kelley's 'Cry for Me'," in American Studies in Scandinavia, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1975, pp. 17-48.

In the following excerpt, Ro discusses the intellectual and philosophical influences on Baldwin at the time he wrote "Sonny's Blues," examining in particular the ways in which the story reflects the existential philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Ro also situates this and other examples of Baldwin's work in the larger context of African-American literature in the pre- and post-Civil Rights eras, suggesting that Baldwin's strategy for writing about the human condition by emphasizing, or universalizing, his characters' existential predicaments was rejected by later generations of black writers.

This essay presents two case studies of the intellectual and ideological sources of the black hero in Afro-American fiction. The two stories by James Baldwin and William Melvin Kelley ['Sonny's Blues' and 'Cry for Me'...