Brooke Allen in The Hudson Review:
The last time I wrote about James Baldwin, in the late 1990s, I concluded that his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was his best, and that his second, Giovanni’s Room, was sentimental, artificial, and populated by stock figures—in fact I agreed with Norman Mailer’s assessment that the novel, dealing openly in Eisenhower’s America with homosexuality, was “brave” but “bad.” Now hailed as a seminal work, it had been turned down by Knopf, who had published Go Tell It on the Mountain. (The novel was eventually published by Dial.) Baldwin assumed that Knopf had expected him to take up the mantle of “Negro writer” and stick to racial subjects, which Giovanni’s Room did not address; or perhaps they had been made nervous by the gay content. But Henry Carlisle, the editor who ruled against it, was not an unworldly man, and I think one can take at face value his objection that the book lacked credible characters and would not enhance the author’s reputation.
More here.
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