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COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press
By David L. Dudley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Pp. 218. $24-95
As the author of My Father's Shadow acknowledges, the theme of "intergenerational conflict in African American men's autobiography" is not arrestingly new to students of this tradition. David L. Dudley claims, with justification, that his book is the first to trace "an unbroken line of such conflict" from Douglass to Malcolm X" (p. 2). Dudley carefully explains what he means by calling the series of figures he discusses--Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X--a "line" rather than a tradition. But he does not say why he regards this line as "unbroken," nor does he explore what the historical implications of his contention might be. One has little difficulty agreeing with Dudley when he attributes "a kind of Oedipal conflict" between Washington and Douglass, Baldwin and Wright, or Cleaver and Baldwin, in which the rising, younger writer "must overcome the older...
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