Critics read Baldwin’s post-1963 writing as a falling-off from his early art.

Evidence

That shift—the shift in his “we”—matters in how we read his engagement with Black Power and his later work. For decades, a standard view of Baldwin’s post-1963 writing held that he had lost a step, that his rage and politics got the best of him, and that his fame kept him from giving his art the attention it needed. James Campbell, an early biographer, wrote that after 1963, Baldwin’s “voice broke.” Others, like Darryl Pinckney, offered a more nuanced, but similar, account: “The news in his later essays is in his mood of supposed candor. He is correcting, refusing to moderate his negativism about the US, and therefore neither betraying nor being betrayed anymore. It is as though he were settling accounts, criticizing, by being more damning, an earlier self for having mastered such a blameless voice.” In other words, Baldwin had let white America off the hook in his early writings, and he was now committed, in order to redeem himself, to condemning them and the country to hell. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 304

Categorization

• XREF: This is the exact ‘bitter late Baldwin’ dismissal the reader is defending against — core to the book’s recanonization thesis.