“Frederick Douglass had charged the air with rebellion and redemption, and these …” — Darryl Pinckney

The draining away of James Baldwin's magic was a drama much discussed in the years leading up to his death in 1987 at the age of sixty-three.

Whatever was said about Ralph Ellison, 'Invisible Man' was considered untouchable.

'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.

Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.