“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... barely having had a career.’He had attracted other advocates too, such as the art historian Meyer Schapiro and the Vogue editor Alexander Liberman, and Hess and Rosenberg were soon to convert, to be followed by young critic-curators like Sam Hunter and Lawrence Alloway. Just as important, Newman finally had patrons such as Ben ...”