The cultural history of American Negro can broadly be demarcated into two periods, the period beginning with folk art before the Emancipation and the period beginning from 1890. The period between Emancipation and 1890 was the gestation period for the Negro novelists. During this period, important events took place in the Negro World of America as the rise of the middle class, different from the mass of freedom by virtue of its superior educational and economic attainment. This middle class developed its own ideology, modeled after the ‘respectable whites’, acquired its own grievances, different from those of slavery. By 1890, this Negro middle class could produce several spokesmen, trying their hand in the art of fiction. But the historical background of this new Negro Middle Class divided the Negro into two classes. The privileged mulattoes, who were the illegitimate off spring of a white man and a Negro slave woman and the slaves. In course of time, these mulattoes considered themselves as privileged ‘Coloured
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Go Tell IT on The Mountain: Baldwin as a novelist emerged on the firmament of American literature in 1953, with the publication of his first novel Go Tell I`t on the Mountain. When Baldwin published this novel, the immediate reaction in the press as well as in the reading public was overwhelmingly encouraging. Except one or two critics, almost all the others stormed the novelist with praises.
Brunn, Robert was one of the few to have a slightly negative idea about the novel. He describes the novel “as novel without joy and with little hope of either progress or self-realization for the Harlem Negros who struggle with poverty, sensualism, each other and white and how they turn to escape the cheerless world”. No other Baldwin’s works except his essays, received such a positive criticism till
Go Tell IT on The Mountain: Baldwin as a novelist emerged on the firmament of American literature in 1953, with the publication of his first novel Go Tell I`t on the Mountain. When Baldwin published this novel, the immediate reaction in the press as well as in the reading public was overwhelmingly encouraging. Except one or two critics, almost all the others stormed the novelist with praises.
Brunn, Robert was one of the few to have a slightly negative idea about the novel. He describes the novel “as novel without joy and with little hope of either progress or self-realization for the Harlem Negros who struggle with poverty, sensualism, each other and white and how they turn to escape the cheerless world”. No other Baldwin’s works except his essays, received such a positive criticism till