Notes of a Native Son
Baldwin's first essay collection established him as the greatest American prose stylist of the 20th century. The title essay, about his father's death, a race riot, and his own rage, is a landmark in American literature. Every sentence is load-bearing.
The three literary-criticism essays that open the book, on Uncle Tom's Cabin, Native Son, and the film Carmen Jones, lean on books and movies most contemporary readers haven't encountered, and those chapters go dead without that background. Some readers call the tone in that stretch academic and lifeless rather than personal, one admitting “felt it was the academic and ponderous tone that deterred me.” Because the ten pieces were written across roughly a decade for different magazines, several readers experience the whole thing as a miscellany rather than a built book, one saying flatly it “reads like a random collection of rants” and another that they “didn't detect a coherent thread.” A second reviewer suggests this isn't the Baldwin to start with, preferring readers arrive here after The Fire Next Time rather than before it.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
