Books: Intelligent Cat

NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME (241 pp.) —James Baldwin—Dial ($4.50).

Negroes who write dislike being classified as "Negro writers"; yet almost without exception, that is what they are—not because they write about Negro life, but because they tend to be obsessed with the Negro's relationship to the white world. James Baldwin shares that obsession, but he expresses it not merely with passion but with candor, describing himself in this book of essays as an "abnormally intelligent, and hungry black cat." Hungry he has surely been; intelligent he clearly is. Although he sometimes low-rates the country that he claims to love, his anger at...

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