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FREEDOMWAYS FIRST QUARTER 1972

that black writers have all sorts of different sensibilities and that anyone who says that black writers are all basically concerned with full rights, expression and humanity for Blacks in the U.S. and are writing out of black experiences that whites don't know about is just spreading new myths of black experience. But how can white critics appraise novels by black writers intelligently if the novels are based on black experiences that the white critics don't know about? One white critic Gross tries to deflect black creative protest writing into Ellisonian existentialism and tragedy and the other Dickstein says that black creative writing is already widely understood and influential in the U.S. Either way, black creative writing is kept as fair game for white critics. It is professors of literature like Gross and Bender and literary critics like Lionel Trilling and his school, with their excessive emphasis on Freudian psychoanalysis and their many literary magazines, who have encouraged and helped American novelists to caricature and reduce women instead of showing them as rounded and fully human. See Carolyn Heilbrun's "The Masculine Wilderness of the American Novel" [Saturday Review, Jan. 29, 1972] from her forthcoming book. The women's liberation movement is fighting this male chauvinist, sexist view of women in American novels and short stories. These psychological critics reject both black manhood and white womanhood in history and in literature.)

Forman, Robert E. BLACK GHETTOS, WHITE GHETTOS AND SLUMS. Englewood CLiffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, viii; 184 pages. $6.00 (cloth); $2.50 (paper).

Freedman, Jill. OLD NEWS: RESURRECTION CITY. New York: Grossman Publishers. $10.00 (cloth); $4.95 (paper). (Photographs and text about the poor people who made up Resurrection City in Washington during the Poor People's Campaign in 1968 led by the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy and the SCLC.)

Funke, Lewis. THE CURTAIN: THE STORY OF OSSIE DAVIS. New York: Grosset and Dunlap. 64 pages. Illus. $2.95. (A book for children about Davis, the well-known actor, playwright, lecturer, film director and militant fighter and activist for black rights.)

Garrison, William Lloyd. THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON Vol. II. A HOUSE DIVIDING AGAINST ITSELF, 1836-1840, edited by Louis Ruchames. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. xxxi; 770 pages. $20.00. (This is the second of a projected six or eight volumes of Garrison's letters being collected and edited by Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames. Volume I, running from 1822 to 1835, was edited by Merrill. This definitive collection of Garrison's letters is important covering his long struggles against slavery, for women's rights, for civil rights and religious reform. Merrill is professor of English at Drexel University. Ruchames is professor of history at the University of Mass. in Boston and author or editor of Race, Jobs and Politics: The Story of the F.E.P.C., The Abolitionists: A Collection of their Writings, John Brown: The Making of a Revolutionary and Racial Thought in America, Vol. I).

Garvin, Richard M. and Edmond G. Addeo. THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: THE LEGEND OF LEADBELLY. New York: Bernard Geis Associates. 313 pages. $6.95.