Everett is perhaps best described as a postmod-
ern writer. Indeed, he employs many of the themes
and approaches commonly associated with the
postmodernists, especially the search for identity,
the effects of alienation, and the frequent, bizarre
mixtures of violence and comedy. And in Erasure,
he joins fellow iconoclast ISHMAEL REED in taking
the hard line against feminist politics in the pub-
lishing industry. While stylistically he is not a min-
iaturist, Everett tends to write concise, compact
prose narratives.
Although Everett is a prolific writer, the criti-
cal appreciation of his work has been scant at best.
There are the usual brief publication notices, re-
views, and several interviews, but relatively few
sustained inquiries have been made into his work.
Yet Everett is still making his reputation, and there
is little question that he is a significant writer of
the contemporary period, occupying a transitional
place between the older cadre of black postmodern
writers, like RALPH ELLISON and CHARLES WRIGHT,
and a younger generation of black comic writers
who are now extending those boundaries.
Warren J. Carson“Everybody’s Protest Novel”
James Baldwin (1949)
The autobiographical information in JAMES BALD-
WIN’s 1955 collection of essays, Notes of a Native
Son, makes clear that Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852),
by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is a text he read often,
if not eagerly, while growing up. Stowe’s novel be-
came a fundamental part of his childhood memo-
ries and the resources he drew upon as a writer.
However, in 1949, Baldwin’s essay, “Everybody’s
Protest Novel,” appeared in Zero, a European jour-
nal, and later that same year in Partisan Review. In
this essay Baldwin revisits and candidly critiques
Stowe’s book with a resounding finality. Baldwin,
the mature reader and thinker, was willing to take
on this American classic text and critique it for
what he now clearly saw as its greatest flaw, dis-
honesty. Baldwin concludes that Uncle Tom’s Cabin
denies, or at a minimum ignores, human complex-
ity. However noble Stowe’s abolitionist intentions
might have been, Baldwin argues, she reduced her
characters to one-dimensional types, and thus she
failed as “a novelist,” becoming instead “an impas-
sioned pamphleteer” (14). Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, in
the end, no more than protest fiction, which, in
Baldwin’s mind, is not art but propaganda.
In “Everybody’s Protest Novel” Baldwin moves
beyond critiquing Uncle Tom’s Cabin as protest
fiction to condemning outright RICHARD WRIGHT,
the author of NATIVE SON (1940), for committing
the same crime as Stowe. Like Stowe, Baldwin con-
tends, Wright was merely a spokesperson for a po-
litical cause. Wright reduced Bigger Thomas, the
protagonist of Native Son, to the same stereotyped
flatness Stowe used in creating Uncle Tom (see
SAMBO AND UNCLE TOM) and placed him in 20th-
century Chicago. By placing Wright and Stowe in
the same arena as writers, and by concluding that
both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son are flawed
and failed novels, Baldwin provoked then, and
continues to elicit now, much controversy and dis-
cussion through “Everybody’s Protest Novel.”
Whether it is a reasonable description or an
overstatement, many biographical critics paint a
picture of Wright as a mentor to the young Bald-
win. Baldwin’s condemnation, therefore, is often
viewed as a betrayal of Wright personally and of the
larger African-American community, since Native
Son was such a landmark publication. Baldwin’s
now-classic essay is construed as “an oblique attack
on Richard Wright—the first of several father-fig-
ures Baldwin was to symbolically slay” (Allen, 34).
Regardless of how close the two male writers really
were, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” brought to an
abrupt end any type of tutor or mentor relation-
ship between Wright and Baldwin.
Despite the strained relationship between the
two writers and the attention it has received over
the years, the essence of Baldwin’s essay must not
be overlooked. The focus on “political and aes-
thetic maturity” (1025) that Geraldine Murphy
alludes to in her reading of Baldwin is central to
“Everybody’s Protest Novel.” According to Murphy,
Baldwin is ready to grapple with the hegemony of
white-dominated society when he unveils its abil-
ity “to convince those people to whom it has given
inferior status of the reality” of the social hierarchy“Everybody’s Protest Novel” 175