“In Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin surveys in pungent commentary certain phases of the contemporary scene as they relate to the citizenry of the United States, particularly Negroes. Harlem, the protest novel, bigoted religion, the Negro press and the student milieu of Paris are all examined in black and white, with alternate shutters clicking, for hours of reading interest. When the young man who wrote this book comes to a point where he can look at life purely as himself, and for himself, the color of his skin mattering not at all, when, as in his own words, he finds ‘his birthright as a man no less than his birthright as a black man,’ America and the world might as well have a major contemporary commentator.”
–Langston Hughes, The New York Times, February 26, 1958
