It is a measure of the potency of Charles White's images that long after his death, they continued to be used on the covers of books, the subjects of which struck a variety of chords with While's art and his own biography.

Typical in this regard was the 1984 publication, Michael G. Cooke, Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The achievement of Intimacy, published by Yale University Press.

From the book's jacket flaps: 

Where modernism in Anglo-American literature wears the guise of an artificial detachment from the human, in Afro-American literature it has taken a different tack: a grappling with a sense of intimacy that involves reaching out of the self into an unguarded, uncircumscribed engagement of the world. Intimacy is an experiment laden with psychocultural risk, and that is why it has been overladen by those with the least to lose in conventional terms - America's black writers.

From this persuasive and original perspective, Michael Cooke examines the essential structure of Afro-American literature in the 20th century. He shows a development out of the secret matrix of "signifying" and the blues into successive conditions of self-veiling, solitude, kinship, and, finally, a lucid, capable state of intimacy. among the individual writers who receive special attention are Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Eldridge cleaver, Robert Hayden, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin. In addition to locating these authors in the progression toward intimacy, Cooke analyzes their work in terms of metamorphosis, materialism, suicide, magic, the interplay of identity and "voice," and the Afro-American posture toward history. In a final chapter, he discusses the most recent black fiction, demonstrating that it sustains the dynamism and creativity of its rich and centripetal tradition

The jacket illustration is Charles White's The Prophet # 1