“…The ink-fading congratulatory letter from Black framed in my office is talismanic, and I write this in the summer of the fortieth anniversary of Stonewall (I was born just a month before), so I understand the power of origin stories, despite their dangers. 4 But I would argue that the 1957 essays, now draped with dust cloth and cobweb, constitute an archive worth mining. Here the mystery of criticism as an art is richly rediscovered and voiced.…”