Attacked, abandoned as a literary example by [James] Baldwin and [Ralph] Ellison, whose early work he had typically encouraged, [Richard Wright] became, after a long eclipse and after his death in 1960, the favored ancestor of a great many new black writers, who rejected his successors and felt more akin to his militant spirit. Parricide, after all, is one of the quicker methods of succession, and nothing can more conveniently legitimate the bloody deed than an appeal to the authority of the grandfather, himself the previous victim. (p. 159)

[It] would be superficial to think that Baldwin alone killed Richard Wright until the angry sixties came along to resurrect him. In some sense Wright's kind of novel was already dead or dying by the time he found it. (p. 160)

Nothing so clearly dates Baldwin's early essays, especially the attacks on Wright, as the assurance that the novel has intrinsically little...