In 1945, his autobiography, Black Boy, was also a bestseller; but Native Son remained the cornerstone of his success. In 1948, his reputation suffered undoubtedly from the adverse criticism of James Baldwin, who essentially launched his own career that year with an essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which dismissed Native Son as a piece of mere “protest” fiction, reductive of human character and thus fatally limited as art. In 1952, the appearance of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, with its dazzling modernist techniques, its lyricism, humor, and final optimism about America, also tended to
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