[Only] two years after its publication, Wright dismissed Uncle Tom's Children as an overly sentimental, naive book. The evaluation seems to have remained unchallenged ever since. Yet it seems, pace the author, as shortsighted as the criticism that the book lacks unity.

[The thematic progression in both] Uncle Tom's Children and Native Son is the same—from a spontaneous, fear-motivated reaction by a black character against "the white mountain" of racial hatred to a realization of the necessity for concentrated Marxist organization of the poor. Also developed in both works are the ideas that sexual taboos between the races confuse and confound the black man's struggle for justice and that nature herself often seems to join with the white man to oppress the Negro (Bigger, fleeing from the police through the hostile, unrelenting Chicago snowstorm) permeate both books. Similarly, such images as "the white mountain" or "the white...