Placing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison side by side, as contemporaries who chose to write novels for the purpose of limning the depths of the American scene, is a critical enterprise that insists as much on a critical leap forward as it does a harkening back. The reasons for this, of course, have a great deal to do with the state of American literary and racial politics in the years following World War II. At that time, with the Civil Rights Movement bringing about calls for racial integration and equal protection under the law for African American citizens, there grew to be a great need for black writers to fulfill the role of articulating what would come to be understood as “the black experience,” by an audience often bewildered by the malevolence of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and the unwavering insistence by Martin Luther King Jr. that justice could only be achieved by peaceful means. How could a people deemed at one time so incapable of eloquence and critical thought suddenly be so persistent in their claims for equality, in their demands that their humanity be fully recognized? Who among them could bring clarity to their motivations?