The work of South African writer Ezekiel Mphahlele has confounded literary critics, especially those who feel compelled to draw a sharp distinction between autobiography and fiction. These critics point to Mphahlele's best-known works—his 1959 autobiography Down Second Avenue and his 1971 novel The Wanderers—to illustrate the problem of categorizing his work. While his autobiography traces his life from age five until the beginning of his self-imposed 20-year exile at age thirty-eight, The Wanderers appears to pick up at the beginning of his exile and go on from there. Critics have variously decried the former as too fictionalized and the latter as too autobiographical, but those who focus on traditional labels inevitably miss the fact that Mphahlele manipulates different prose forms purely in the service of the social message he advances.

Even where critics give him a favorable reading, all too often their reviews carry a negative subtext. For example, one critic said of The Wanderers that if anger, firsthand experiences, compassion, and topicality were the sole requirements for great literature, the novel might well be one of the masterpieces of this declining part of the twentieth century. And although this critic may not have meant to question the literary contribution of the novel, there are those who are outright dismissive of The Wanderers because it contains an autobiographical framework and is populated with real-world characters. Mphahlele briefly defends against such charges by pointing out the importance of the fictional father-son relationship that opens and closes the novel. But his greater concern is the social vision that pervades his work, though it too is prone to misunderstandings and underappreciation. Mphahlele is a humanist and an integrationist, and his writings wonderfully articulate his vision of the future; but critics often balk at this vision because Mphahlele provides no road maps for bringing such a future about.

Mphahlele himself shows little interest in establishing guidelines to distinguish autobiography from fiction. Though he does refer to Down Second Avenue as an autobiography and The Wanderers as a novel, he asserts that no novelist can write complete fiction or absolute fact. It is the nature of writing, at least the writing he cares about, that the details must be drawn from the writer's experiences, and thus are in some sense fact, but conveyed in such a way as to maximize the effectiveness of the social message contained in the work, and thus inevitably fiction. As he claims, the whole point of the exercise of writing has nothing to do with classification; in all forms writing is the transmission of ideas, and important ideas at that: "Whenever you write prose or poetry or drama you are writing a social criticism of one kind or another. If you don't, you are completely irrelevant—you don't count."