SONS OF DARKNESS, SONS OF LIGHT by John A. Williams. 279 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.
Black writers telling it like it is have found no substitute for straight-out autobiography. No novel by James Baldwin can match the fervid personal essays in his The Fire Next Time. What black fiction can begin to compare with The Autobiography of Malcolm X or even Claude Brown's somewhat overrated Manchild in the Promised Land? The fire a black autobiographer kindles burns the reader. The fire a black novelist sets has a way of burning himself blowing his cool, singeing his prose style and casting clouds of...
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