Baldwin is a remarkable writer on both fronts, fiction and nonfiction, and I would rank him among America’s 20th-century greats. Not just for his boldness and courage, not just for his enormous emotional range (from boiling anger to the most exquisite tenderness), but for the quality of the writing itself, the chiseled grace of his sentences. Baldwin’s prose is what I would call “classical American,” in the same sense that Thoreau is classical, and at his best I believe Baldwin is fully equal to Thoreau at his best.