Of everybody who wrote about the book, I thought Jimmy Baldwin got it best. “The tone of the book,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books, “does not seem to depend on anything that we think of as a literary tradition but on something older than that: the tale told by a member of the tribe to the tribe. It has the urgency of a confession and the stammering authority of a plea. Kazan is talking, trying to tell us something and not only for his sake … but also for ours. ‘I don’t like my life! How have I become what I have become?…These men who cried, America America!, as the century died, had come here looking for freedom and all they found was the freedom to make as much money as possible.’ This is not the official version of American history but that it very nearly sums it up can scarcely be doubted by anyone with the courage to look into the faces one encounters all over this land, who listens to the voices, hearing the buried uneasiness, translating itself hourly into a hatred of all that is strange or vivid, into a hatred, at last, of life.”