Baldwin first ascended into the ranks of America's great literary figures while raising, particularly in his searing essays, unsettling questions about the nation's past and present, all rendered with a cutting, double-edged honesty: He was unsparing but also generous, lyrical, edifying as a conscience. More than a decade and a half before Chase arrived for the "20/20" interview, in the early 1960s, Baldwin would appear on the cover of Time magazine ("The Negro's Push for Equality"), travel for television appearances and lectures and, famously, debate the conservative writer William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965. As the 1970s closed, though, and the gains of the civil rights movement quelled mainstream fascination, Baldwin no longer roused attention in quite the same way. In 1979, something convinced ABC that the "20/20" interview wasn't enough. The segment was scrapped. According to Lovett, the reaction at the show was, roughly, "Who wants to listen to a Black gay has-been?"

Among earlier critics, though, Baldwin could face a combination of dissent and humiliation. By the late 1960s, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in a 1992 essay, "Baldwin-bashing was almost a rite of initiation" for a new generation of Black intellectuals; he was dismissed with homophobic epithets, or had his erudition interpreted as a capitulation to white intellectuals. ("Soul on Ice," Eldridge Cleaver's memoir, was laced with homophobic rebukes of Baldwin and described "Negro homosexuals" as "frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man"; Amiri Baraka criticized Baldwin for "playing the distressed aesthete in Europe.") Martin Luther King Jr., in a private conversation recorded and summarized by the F.B.I., claimed to be put off by Baldwin's "poetic exaggeration." Even that Time magazine profile noted that Baldwin was "not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Negro leader," described him as "nervous, slight, almost fragile" and "effeminate in manner," and said he "often loses his audience with overblown arguments."

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