Another Country,1 James Baldwin's sensational evocation of racial and sexual turbulence, has sometimes been lost sight of in the heat of critical defense or attack. The novel deals with a group of people - chiefly Americans - in a chaos of values which have hardened into ideas, traditions and institutions enslaving a nation and a world of men and women who try desperately to prove to themselves and their neighbors that they are free, happy, and. normal. Baldwin's novel casts on these people a discomforting ray of light which reveals them for lost souls, whose Harlem slums, Manhattan canyons and nuclear warheads are measures of their lostness. Realism, or empiricism, is the germinating principle of Baldwin's method: he discards preconceptions and works only from what his senses, his emotion, and his intellect show him to be true from his own experience.

Another Country,1 James Baldwin's sensational evocation of racial and sexual turbulence, has sometimes been lost sight of in the heat of critical defense or attack. The novel deals with a group of people - chiefly Americans - in a chaos of values which have hardened into ideas, traditions and institutions enslaving a nation and a world of men and women who try desperately to prove to themselves and their neighbors that they are free, happy, and. normal. Baldwin's novel casts on these people a discomforting ray of light which reveals them for lost souls, whose Harlem slums, Manhattan canyons and nuclear warheads are measures of their lostness. Realism, or empiricism, is the germinating principle of Baldwin's method: he discards preconceptions and works only from what his senses, his emotion, and his intellect show him to be true from his own experience.