James Baldwin’s seminal essay collection Notes of a Native Son was first published in November of 1955; on February 26, 1956, a review of the book by Langston Hughes—then already an established literary figure who had been instrumental in the Harlem Renaissance—was published in The New York Times Book Review.
Hughes was impressed by the effort, Baldwin's second, following his debut novel Go Tell It On the Mountain, but thought Baldwin had some room to grow. There is much praise in the review: “As an essayist he is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing,” Hughes writes. "And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing.” He adds that “[f]ew American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin. . . In his essays, words and material suit each other. The thought becomes poetry, and the poetry illuminates the thought.”
But Hughes wasn’t sure that the younger writer had fully matured—particularly as it pertained to his relationship to his own identity:
James Baldwin writes down to nobody, and he is trying very hard to write up to himself . . . 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. . . . That Baldwin's viewpoints are half American, half Afro-American, incompletely fused, is a hurdle which Baldwin himself realizes he still has to surmount. When he does, there will be a straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity that should influence for the better all who ponder on the things books say.
Interestingly, a few years later, on March 29, 1959, James Baldwin had the opportunity to review Hughes’ Selected Poems, and expressed a similar—if perhaps harsher—mix of admiration and dissatisfaction. “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them,” Baldwin begins. And it’s hard not to read a direct rebuke in Baldwin’s kicker: “Hughes is an American Negro poet and has no choice but to be acutely aware of it. He is not the first American Negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable.”
The two writers were made from very different molds, as Terrance Hayes has pointed out. Still, they had respect for one another. As Baldwin told the Langston Hughes Review in 1986, “when I read Langston, it was like I was reading a book and looking up and what was on the page was in a sense right before my eyes. But he helped me to see it, you know. He helped me to locate myself in it. So that I wasn’t entirely lost.”
