was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago.

I began plotting novels at about the time I learned

to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the
restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In those days my
mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies. As they were
born, I took them over with one hand and held a book with the other. The children probably
suffered, though they have since been kind enough to deny it, and in this way I read Uncle
Tom's Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities over and over and over again; in this way, in fact, I
read just about everything I could get my hands on--except the Bible, probably because it
was the only book I was encouraged to read. I must also confess that I wrote--a great
deal--and my first professional triumph, in any case, the first effort of mine to be seen in
print, occurred at the age of twelve or thereabouts, when a short story I had written about the
Spanish revolution won some sort of prize in an extremely short-lived church newspaper. I
remember the story was censored by the lady editor, though I don't remember why, and I
was outraged.

Also wrote plays, and songs, for one of which I received a letter of congratulations from
Mayor La Guardia, and poetry, about which the less said, the better. My mother was
delighted by all these goings-on, but my father wasn't; he wanted me to be a preacher. When
I was fourteen I became a preacher, and when I was seventeen I stopped. Very shortly
thereafter I left home. For God knows how long I struggled with the world of commerce and
industry--I guess they would say they struggled with me--and when I was about twenty-one I
had enough done of a novel to get a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the
fellowship was over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on tables in a
Village restaurant and writing book reviews--mostly, as it turned out, about the Negro
problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert. Did
another book, in company with photographer Theodore Pelatowski, about the store-front
churches in Harlem. This book met exactly the same fate as my first--fellowship, but no sale.
(It was a Rosenwald Fellowship.) By the time I was twenty-four I had decided to stop
reviewing books about the Negro problem--which, by this time, was only slightly less horrible
in print than it was in life--and I packed my bags and went to France, where I finished, God
knows how, Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a
conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to
support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a
frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any
writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds
that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each
other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and
his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next--one is tempted to
say that he moves from one disaster to the next. When one begins looking for influences one
finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard
that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent
and perpetually understated in Negro speech--and something of Dickens' love for
bravura--have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise,
innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult
(and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was
forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality. (Truce, by the way, is the best
one can hope for.)

One of the difficulties about being a Negro writer (and this is not special pleading, since I
don't mean to suggest that he has it worse than anybody else) is that the Negro problem is
written about so widely. The bookshelves groan under the weight of information, and
everyone therefore considers himself informed. And this information, furthermore, operates
usually (generally, popularly) to reinforce traditional attitudes. Of traditional attitudes there
are only two--For or Against--and I, personally, find it difficult to say which attitude has
caused me the most pain. I am speaking as a writer; from a social point of view I am
perfectly aware that the change from ill-will to good-will, however motivated, however
imperfect, however expressed, is better than no change at all.

But it is part of the business of the writer--as I see it--to examine attitudes, to go beneath the
surface, to tap the source. From this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible.
It is not only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It is quite possible to say
that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing
to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit
on't is I know how to curse.") Consider: the tremendous social activity that this problem
generates imposes on whites and Negroes alike the necessity of looking forward, of working
to bring about a better day. This is fine, it keeps the waters troubled; it is all, indeed, that has
made possible the Negro's progress. Nevertheless, social affairs are not generally speaking
the writer's prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he
establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so
that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a
long look back. In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent
reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that
makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long
as we refuse to assess it honestly.

I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was
forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my
past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a
really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to
the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were
not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever
for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I
had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use--I had certainly been unfitted for the
jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make
them mine--I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this
scheme--otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was
the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the
American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated
and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I
despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and
feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether
murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could never hope to
write.