The New Yorker was trying not to speak ill of the dead when it described Anatole Broyard as the "famously prickly critic for the Times, a man who demanded so much from books that it seemed he could never be satisfied." From his early reviews for The Times in the 1960's up to his death in 1990, Mr. Broyard was often gratuitously cruel and clever at the author's expense.

The novelist Philip Roth was one of the favored few. Mr. Broyard praised him in the column "About Books" and seemed to see his life through Mr. Roth's work. When Mr. Broyard was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he compared his symptoms to those of Portnoy, Mr. Roth's fictional alter ego in "Portnoy's Complaint."

The comparison made perfect sense. Mr. Roth's great theme was his own struggle to preserve selfhood against the smothering pressures of ethnic identity. That, in a nutshell, was Mr. Broyard's life. He was a light-skinned black man born in New Orleans in 1920 into a family whose members sometimes passed as white to work at jobs from which black people were barred. The largest private employer of black labor at the time was the Pullman Company, which sought college-educated black men to work essentially as servants on train cars that accommodated white travelers only.

Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer — and not just a "Negro writer" consigned to the back of the literary bus. He followed the trail blazed by tens of thousands of light-skinned black Americans. He methodically cut ties with his family (including a mother and two sisters) and took up life as a white man with a white wife in white Connecticut. By the late 1980's, he had been "white" for 40 years, with two adult children who were unaware that they were part of a large black family that included an aunt who lived an hour away in Manhattan.