The recent work by sociolinguists is more accurate for consideration of urban dialects than is the analysis provided in the "Linguistic Atlas" materials. The sociolinguists' work shows that the use of nonstandard phonological and grammatical features varies according to one's socioeconomic status, ethnic background, speech context, age, and sex. Using the sociolinguists' data for several phonological and grammatical variables in Negro speech, it is possible to make statistical generalizations concerning particular types of speakers. With such generalizations in mind it is possible, by analyzing the literary representation of the Negro nonstandard dialect appearing in three books, to determine the accuracy of these representations. The books considered here are Shane Stevens'"Go Down Dead" (1966), Warren Miller's "The Cool World" (1959), and Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land" (1965). Suggestions for further study on determining the accuracy of literary dialect representations, tables on the statistical analysis, and a bibliography are provided. (VM)