Ralph Waldo Ellison and James Arthur Baldwin fused the warring emotions of love and anger in order to draw out the complexities of black American experience and subjectivity. While both Ellison and Baldwin were (like many black Americans) angry about their country's failure to live up to its promise, to its democratic ideals, they also expressed love for America. Their attempts to reconcile the tension between loving America and being angry about its failings on racial matters link two central interrelated themes in their work: the quest for American identity and the myth of the American Dream. In exploring these overarching themes, they used aesthetic approaches that allowed them to focus on the importance of self-definition and personal responsibility while also exploring the relationship between democracy and love.

While both authors criticized America, Baldwin was more open and public in making extra-literary political commentary. Indeed, Baldwin, the Harlembred poet/prophet/philosopher, was as interested in critiquing American identity as he was in embracing it. He produced most of his novels while living abroad, where he fled early and often. Writing in 1986, the year before his death, of the betrayal of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “dream,” Baldwin emphasized America's betrayal of its own ideals: “I think it [King's dream] was manipulated, as were we, and that it was never intended that any promise made would be kept. In any case, and incontestably, we are certainly no better off in 1986 than we were that day in Washington, in 1963,” the year of King's historic march on Washington.