When James Baldwin first began writing, the older novelist Richard Wright was already well-established. In 1944 Baldwin sought out Wright's mentorship and Wright helped Baldwin secure the fellowship that allowed him to write his first novel. He also introduced him to editors at the publisher Harper & Brother. Yet in 1949, Baldwin published "Everybody's Protest Novel," the essay heavily critiquing Wright that was later collected in Notes of a Native Son. The essay takes Wright to task for confirming racist stereotypes about black people in Native Son (1940). The friendship between the two writers ended.
Though it is easy to read "Everybody's Protest Novel" as a personal attack on Wright, it is more productive to understand how it helped Baldwin clarify his own idea of literature. When Baldwin wrote the essay, Wright was a literary giant. Native Son had sold 215,000 copies in its first three weeks. As a younger writer trying to write about race in new ways, it made sense for Baldwin to begin with a critique in order to put forward his own conception of literature's relationship to politics. Native Son was an example of the kind of protest literature that was dominant in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. By 1949, this Popular Front era, a period where left-wing movements were strong in the US, was over. Baldwin thought that the new age required a new kind of writing, so he took on his elders.
In hindsight, however, Baldwin recognized that he had been overly harsh. In the later essay "Alas, Poor Richard," he admitted that he broke with his mentor Wright at a youthful and "carnivorous age" when coming into his own as a writer also meant violently attacking his predecessors. Yet Baldwin admits here that Native Son "expressed, for the first time in my life, the sorrow, the rage, and the murderous bitterness which was eating up my life. . . . His work was an immense liberation and revelation for me.” Despite the aesthetic and political differences between the two writers, both are hugely important figures in 20th-century American literature.
