Three Lean Cats in a Hall of Mirrors: James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Eldridge Cleaver on Race and Masculinity

Abstract

During the 1950s and 1960s, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Eldridge Cleaver initiated a literary discussion on race and masculinity that explored the undercurrents of conflict and power traversing the Beat, Civil Rights, and Black Power movements of the post-World War II era. This conversation was prescient, if sometimes also awkward and troubling, in its exploration of the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in U.S. society. Baldwin's Another Country and The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy, Mailer's The White Negro, and Cleaver's Soul on Ice attempt to renegotiate homosocial relations between black men and white men during the post-World War II era in the hopes of moving closer to some form of racial reconciliation.