In Baldwin's first published collection of short stories, written between 1948 and 1965, a young girl attempts to accept the impending departure of her lover; an African American entertainer who has made his name in Europe faces the prospect of returning to the United States; a young man who has achieved middle-class status has to accommodate his brother's life of jazz, dope addiction, and prison; a white policeman in a Southern town recalls the mutilation and lynching of a black man. Baldwin's situations are always ruthlessly spare. Every situation is firmly rooted in the world as he knew it, and the characters are so accurately perceived and truthfully rendered that the overall effect is almost musical -- in that we may still hear music long after it is played. Here is an author who writes about what matters.