Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the end, almost no one can bear it. At the peak of his acting career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly struck down by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, we see the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his entry into the world of theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. And everywhere there is the agony of being black in a society that seems to be on the brink of a race war. In this tender, angry novel from 1968, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters: a man struggling to become himself.