That perceived detachment has drawn criticism. When “Between the World and Me” was published, Dr. West took issue with Ms. Morrison’s comparison of Mr. Coates to Baldwin and expressed as much in a Facebook post, writing that, unlike Mr. Coates, “Baldwin’s painful self-examination led to collective action and a focus on social movements.” In his view, Mr. Coates’s inattention to the Black Lives Matter movement and political activists in “Between the World and Me” “shows a certain distance” from his subject matter.

Mr. Coates counters that he hopes he writes “things that clarify stuff for people that go to those marches, that clarify things that inspire people who go and think about policy. I necessarily need a little bit of distance.”

The National Book award-winning author Jesmyn Ward, who edited “The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race” last year, had a similar response: “Writers use the weapons that they have at hand,” she said, “and though I know that there are many writers that do attend protests — I’ve attended protests in my time — perhaps Ta-Nehisi feels that his most powerful weapon and his most appropriate weapon is his voice.”

There has been criticism, also, of the conspicuous absence of women’s experiences in Mr. Coates’s work. In a review of “Between the World and Me,” Buzzfeed’s Shani O. Hilton wrote, “Black womanhood in real life isn’t — as it largely is in ‘Between the World and Me’ — about beating and loving and mourning black men.” She lamented that Mr. Coates’s book, which is specifically about the lives of black males, “is one that many readers will use to define blackness.”

It’s a position that Mr. Coates has seriously considered, but he said that the book focused on black male life because “it was the story I had.” He’d been mulling for years over the death of his friend, Prince Jones, a black man, and the decision to address the book to his son necessarily skewed its perspective. Ultimately, he said, “we just need more books.”

Yet Mr. Coates’s work has resonated deeply. In a telephone conversation, Dr. Painter said that his vision of the United States was congruent with her own. “I think the education that he gave himself — his upbringing and his reading as a student, his reading since that time — all of that has given him a really solid intellectual basis for what he’s talking about.”