famous james baldwin essays

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15 great articles and essays by james baldwin, stranger in the village, notes of a native son, how to cool it by james baldwin, letter from a region in my mind, a talk to teachers, the american dream is at the expense of the american negro by james baldwin, autobiographical notes by james baldwin, a report from occupied territory by james baldwin, if black english isn’t a language, then tell me, what is, many thousands gone, a letter to my nephew, sonny’s blues, the creative process, 150 great articles and essays.

On Literature

Everybody’s protest novel, why i stopped hating shakespeare by james baldwin, collected essays : notes of a native son / nobody knows my name / the fire next time / no name in the street / the devil finds work / other essays.

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First writings and move to Europe

Civil rights activism and the fire next time, later career and honors.

• When did the American civil rights movement start?
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James Baldwin

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• Amercian Society of Authors and Writers - Biography of James Baldwin
• The Guardian - ‘He craved an Oscar’: James Baldwin’s long campaign to crack Hollywood
• BlackPast - Biography of James Baldwin
• Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of African American History and Culture - An Introduction to James Baldwin
• PBS - American Masters - James Baldwin Biography
• Chicago Public Library - Biography of James Baldwin
• Black History in America - James Baldwin
• BlackHistoryNow - Biography of James Baldwin
• Poetry Foundation - James Baldwin
• Academy of American Poets - Biography of James Baldwin
• James Baldwin - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• James Baldwin - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

What is James Baldwin known for? 

James Baldwin wrote eloquently, thoughtfully, and passionately on the subject of race in America in novels, essays, and plays. He is perhaps best known for his books of essays, in particular Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963). 

What was James Baldwin’s education?

James Baldwin grew up in New York City ’s Harlem neighbourhood in an atmosphere of poverty and strict religious observance. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in 1942 but was otherwise self-taught.

What novels and plays did James Baldwin write?

James Baldwin’s novels included Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), Another Country (1962), and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974; film 2018). He wrote the plays The Amen Corner (1955) and Blues for Mister Charlie (1964).

Where did James Baldwin live?

James Baldwin lived in New York City until 1948, when he moved to Paris . He returned to the United States in 1957, and from 1969 he lived alternately in the south of France and in New York and New England in the U.S.

James Baldwin (born August 2, 1924, New York , New York, U.S.—died December 1, 1987, Saint-Paul de Vence, France) was an essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him one of the most important voices of the 20th century. A writer of exceptionally clear and psychologically penetrating prose , Baldwin addressed race relations with deft complexity and incisive anger. He was also one of the first Black writers to include queer themes in fiction, notably in Giovanni’s Room (1956), writing with a frankness that was highly controversial at the time. His works include the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Another Country (1962), the plays The Amen Corner (1954) and Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), and the essay collections Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963).

The eldest of nine children, Baldwin grew up in poverty in Harlem in New York City . He was born to a single mother, Emma Berdis Jones, who had migrated to New York from Maryland . When her son was about three years old, she married David Baldwin, a Baptist minister who had moved north from New Orleans . Growing up, James Baldwin found refuge in reading books at the public library , and he began writing poems , short stories , and plays at a young age.

From age 14 to 17 Baldwin was active during out-of-school hours as a preacher in a small Pentecostal church, a period he wrote about in his semiautobiographical first and finest novel , Go Tell It on the Mountain , and in his play about a woman evangelist , The Amen Corner . Baldwin’s preaching was the influence of his strict stepfather, with whom he had a fraught relationship. Although Baldwin abandoned preaching, that period of his life was important to his development as a writer. In an interview captured in the documentary film The Price of the Ticket (released posthumously in 1989), Baldwin said: “Those three years in the pulpit …that is what turned me into a writer, really, dealing with all that anguish and that despair and that beauty.”

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

After his graduation from high school , Baldwin began a restless period of ill-paid jobs, self-study, and literary apprenticeship in Greenwich Village , the bohemian quarter of New York City. His first publications were book reviews in journals and magazines . In 1944 he met Richard Wright , an established giant in American literature , who helped Baldwin secure a monetary grant with which Baldwin could support himself while finishing his first novel. In the meantime, Baldwin began to publish work in prestigious periodicals. Among these was the essay “The Harlem Ghetto,” published in Commentary in 1948, a piece on the socioeconomic conditions in his childhood neighborhood that garnered him much attention. That same year, wishing to escape the racism of America (and the homophobia of Harlem), he left the United States for Paris , where he lived for the next eight years. (In later years, from 1969, he became a self-styled “transatlantic commuter,” living alternatively in the south of France and in New York and New England , with frequent long stays in Turkey .)

While living in Paris, Baldwin published “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), an essay that critiqued Wright’s celebrated work Native Son (1940), comparing it unfavorably to Harriet Beecher Stowe ’s abolitionist novel of 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin . It was the first of several harsh and controversial critiques of his former mentor’s writing that Baldwin published over the course of his career. In 1952, while living in a small village in the Swiss Alps with his lover, the painter Lucien Happersberger, Baldwin completed Go Tell It on the Mountain , which was published to positive reviews a year later. In 1955 came Baldwin’s first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son , which includes cultural commentary on literature and film , a haunting memoir of his stepfather’s life and death, and pieces on the experience of being an African American expatriate in Europe . That same year his first play, The Amen Corner , was produced for the stage at Howard University . (Its Broadway debut came in 1965.) Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room , was dedicated to Happersberger. The book deals with the white world and concerns an American in Paris who is torn between his love for a man and his love for a woman. Because of its theme of homosexuality , the book was rejected by Knopf, the publisher of Baldwin’s first novel, before being accepted by Dial Press.

In 1957 Baldwin returned to the United States and became an active participant in the civil rights struggle, touring the South and eventually befriending the movement’s leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. , and Medgar Evers . In 1961 Baldwin published another book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name , which explores topics such as Southern society in the fiction of William Faulkner , sexual identity in the work of French writer André Gide , and the films of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman . The theme of Black-white relations in the United States was central to his novel Another Country (1962), which examines sexual as well as racial issues in a storyline that involves interracial relationships and bisexuality .

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

The New Yorker magazine gave over almost all of its November 17, 1962, issue to a long article by Baldwin on the Black Muslim separatist movement and other aspects of the civil rights struggle. The article, along with a letter to his nephew that was published in The Progressive to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation , became a bestseller in book form as The Fire Next Time (1963). An explosive work of profound social influence, The Fire Next Time was an urgent warning to white Americans about the consequences of their oppression of African Americans . Taking its title from a Black spiritual , the essay closed in prophetic terms:

If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country , and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave , is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

Throughout 1963 Baldwin was heavily involved in the civil rights movement. With a group of other artists, he met with U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in an attempt to open a dialogue between the government and activists. (The meeting ended in rancorous disappointment.) He also led a march in Paris in support of the American civil rights movement , and he participated in the historic March on Washington on August 28, although he was not invited to speak at the latter event because, according to Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X (who was a friend of Baldwin’s), “They wouldn’t let Baldwin get up there because they know Baldwin is liable to say anything.”

The following year Baldwin published a protest play about racist oppression, Blues for Mister Charlie (“Mister Charlie” being a Black term for a white man). Loosely based on the murder in 1955 of African American teenager Emmett Till by two white men, Blues for Mister Charlie played on Broadway to mixed reviews. In 1965 Baldwin published his first collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man . In March that year, he participated in the Selma March in Alabama , a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery that was led by King in support of African Americans’ voting rights in the state.

A magnetic and passionate speaker, Baldwin was often invited to appear on television to discuss the civil rights movement. In 1965 he participated in a debate at the University of Cambridge in England with conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr. , on the topic “The American Dream : Is it at the expense of the American Negro?” One of the most memorable comments he made during the debate was on the clash between white European and American “systems of reality” and the formation of African American identity:

It comes as a great shock, around the age of five or six or seven, to discover that the flag to which you’ve pledged allegiance , along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that [actor] Gary Cooper killing off the Indians [in movies], when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.

After speaking, Baldwin received a one-minute-long standing ovation from the audience. (Buckley’s speech was not met with the same reaction.)

In 1968 Baldwin agreed to write the screenplay for a film adaptation of Alex Haley ’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Malcolm X had been assassinated in 1965. After the assassination of King in April 1968, however, Baldwin resigned from working on the script. (He eventually published the workings of the screenplay as a book in 1972.) Baldwin also published the novels Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979) as well as a collection of autobiographical writings, The Price of the Ticket (1985). Yet none of his later works achieved the popular and critical success of his early work, and he struggled to drum up publishers’ interest in some of his later writings. He was the subject of ostracism by more-radical Black leaders and writers of the 1960s and ’70s, such as the activist Eldridge Cleaver and the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka , who objected to Baldwin’s more- pacifist views. (Cleaver’s criticism of Baldwin also contained statements that were outright homophobic .)

In the 1970s and ’80s Baldwin taught and lectured at numerous American universities, including the University of California at Berkeley , the University of Massachusetts at Amherst , and Mount Holyoke College . During his career he was the recipient of Guggenheim (1954) and Ford Foundation (1958) fellowships and the George Polk Award for journalism (1963), and he was accepted into the Legion of Honour (1986), France’s most prestigious order. He died at age 63 of stomach cancer while at his home in the south of France.

After Baldwin’s death in 1987, his work continued to influence new writers and thinkers. His writing on racial and social issues came to the foreground in the 21st century, in particular, with the rise of activist groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), an international social movement that formed in the United States in 2013 to fight racism and anti-Black violence, including police brutality . Baldwin was also embraced by LGBTQ activists and writers for his pioneering exploration of sexual identity and queer relationships in his work. Numerous books and documentaries have emerged that pay homage to Baldwin and provide further context on the impact of his life and career.

In 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates ’s National Book Award -winning Between the World and Me , which takes the form of a letter written to Coates’s son, was directly inspired by Baldwin’s letter to his nephew in The Fire Next Time . In 2016 Baldwin was the subject of an Oscar -nominated documentary by director Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro . The film mixed archival footage of the civil rights movement with contemporary footage of the BLM movement and included historical interviews with Baldwin. Its script was taken from an unfinished memoir by Baldwin, Remember This House , which recounted his friendships with the assassinated civil rights leaders Medgar Evers , Malcolm X , and Martin Luther King, Jr. Also in 2016 the novelist and memoirist Jesmyn Ward edited The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race , a collection of essays and poems by prominent African American writers, including Isabel Wilkerson , Edwidge Danticat , Claudia Rankine , and Kevin Young . Baldwin’s fiction and plays were also the focus of renewed attention, including his 1974 novel of two teenage lovers in Harlem, If Beale Street Could Talk . It was made into a feature film of the same name in 2018 by acclaimed director Barry Jenkins , whose Oscar-winning LGBTQ coming-of-age film Moonlight (2016) Jenkins once described as “sort of the child of Giovanni’s Room and The Fire Next Time .”

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50 Years Of NPR

The best of james baldwin: favorite pieces from the npr archive, 'tcm reframed' looks at beloved old movies through modern eyes.

James Baldwin, circa 1979. Ralph Gatti/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

James Baldwin, circa 1979.

We are marking a milestone, 50 years of NPR, with a look back at stories from the archive.

James Baldwin Examines The Role Of Film In American Mythmaking

James Baldwin discusses cinema's role in perpetuating myths about American history and culture. "History is not a matter of the past. It's a matter of the present," he warns.

From the program Voices in the Wind (May 30, 1976)

'this fight begins in the heart': reading james baldwin as ferguson seethes.

It is early August. A black man is shot by a white policeman. And the effect on the community is of "a lit match in a tin of gasoline." No, this is not Ferguson, Mo. This was Harlem in August 1943, a period that James Baldwin writes about in the essay that gives its title to his seminal collection, Notes of a Native Son .

From All Things Considered (August 19, 2014)

Director raoul peck: james baldwin was 'speaking directly to me'.

In the course of his work, James Baldwin got to know the civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. He was devastated when each man was assassinated, and planned, later in life, to write a book about all three of them. Though Baldwin died in 1987 before that book could be written, the new Oscar-nominated documentary , I Am Not Your Negro , draws on his notes for the book, as well as from other of Baldwin's writings.

From Fresh Air (February 14, 2017)

James baldwin's shadow.

James Baldwin believed that America has been lying to itself since its founding. He wrote, spoke, and thought incessantly about the societal issues that still exist today. As the United States continues to reckon with its history of systemic racism and police brutality, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. guides us through the meaning and purpose of James Baldwin's work and how his words can help us navigate the current moment.

From Throughline (April 29, 2021)

James Baldwin

James Baldwin was an essayist, playwright, novelist and voice of the American civil rights movement known for works including 'Notes of a Native Son,' 'The Fire Next Time' and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain.'

(1924-1987)

Who Was James Baldwin?

Writer and playwright James Baldwin published the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain , receiving acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality and humanity. Other novels included Giovanni's Room , Another Country and Just Above My Head, as well as essays like Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time .

Writer and playwright James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York. One of the 20th century's greatest writers, Baldwin broke new literary ground with the exploration of racial and social issues in his many works. He was especially known for his essays on the Black experience in America.

Baldwin was born to a young single mother, Emma Jones, at Harlem Hospital. She reportedly never told him the name of his biological father. Jones married a Baptist minister named David Baldwin when James was about three years old.

Despite their strained relationship, Baldwin followed in his stepfather's footsteps — who he always referred to as his father — during his early teen years. He served as a youth minister in a Harlem Pentecostal church from the ages of 14 to 16.

Baldwin developed a passion for reading at an early age and demonstrated a gift for writing during his school years. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he worked on the school's magazine with future famous photographer Richard Avedon .

Baldwin published numerous poems, short stories and plays in the magazine, and his early work showed an understanding for sophisticated literary devices in a writer of such a young age.

After graduating from high school in 1942, he had to put his plans for college on hold to help support his family, which included seven younger children. He took whatever work he could find, including laying railroad tracks for the U.S. Army in New Jersey.

During this time, Baldwin frequently encountered discrimination, being turned away from restaurants, bars and other establishments because he was African American. After being fired from the New Jersey job, Baldwin sought other work and struggled to make ends meet.

Aspiring Writer

On July 29, 1943, Baldwin lost his father — and gained his eighth sibling the same day. He soon moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City neighborhood popular with artists and writers.

Devoting himself to writing a novel, Baldwin took odd jobs to support himself. He befriended writer Richard Wright , and through Wright, he was able to land a fellowship in 1945 to cover his expenses. Baldwin started getting essays and short stories published in such national periodicals as The Nation , Partisan Review and Commentary .

Three years later, Baldwin made a dramatic change in his life and moved to Paris on another fellowship. The shift in location freed Baldwin to write more about his personal and racial background.

"Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I see where I came from very clearly...I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both," Baldwin once told The New York Times . The move marked the beginning of his life as a "transatlantic commuter," dividing his time between France and the United States.

'Go Tell It on the Mountain'

Baldwin had his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , published in 1953. The loosely autobiographical tale focused on the life of a young man growing up in Harlem grappling with father issues and his religion.

" Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father," he later said.

Gay Literature

In 1954, Baldwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He published his next novel, Giovanni's Room , the following year. The work told the story of an American living in Paris and broke new ground for its complex depiction of homosexuality, a then-taboo subject.

Love between men was also explored in a later Baldwin novel Just Above My Head (1978). The author would also use his work to explore interracial relationships, another controversial topic for the times, as seen in the 1962 novel Another Country .

Baldwin was open about his homosexuality and relationships with both men and women. Yet he believed that the focus on rigid categories was just a way of limiting freedom and that human sexuality is more fluid and less binary than often expressed in the U.S.

"If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy," the writer said in a 1969 interview when asked if being gay was an aberration, asserting that such views were an indication of narrowness and stagnation.

'Nobody Knows My Name'

Baldwin explored writing for the stage a well. He wrote The Amen Corner , which looked at the phenomenon of storefront Pentecostal religion. The play was produced at Howard University in 1955, and later on Broadway in the mid-1960s.

It was his essays, however, that helped establish Baldwin as one of the top writers of the times. Delving into his own life, he provided an unflinching look at the Black experience in America through such works as Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961).

Nobody Knows My Name hit the bestsellers list, selling more than a million copies. While not a marching or sit-in style activist, Baldwin emerged as one of the leading voices in the Civil Rights Movement for his compelling work on race.

'The Fire Next Time'

In 1963, there was a noted change in Baldwin's work with The Fire Next Time . This collection of essays was meant to educate white Americans on what it meant to be Black. It also offered white readers a view of themselves through the eyes of the African American community.

In the work, Baldwin offered a brutally realistic picture of race relations, but he remained hopeful about possible improvements. "If we...do not falter in our duty now, we may be able...to end the racial nightmare." His words struck a chord with the American people, and The Fire Next Time sold more than a million copies.

That same year, Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine. "There is not another writer — white or Black — who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South," Time said in the feature.

Baldwin wrote another play, Blues for Mister Charlie , which debuted on Broadway in 1964. The drama was loosely based on the 1955 racially motivated murder of a young African American boy named Emmett Till .

This same year, his book with friend Avedon entitled Nothing Personal , hit bookstore shelves. The work was a tribute to slain civil rights movement leader Medgar Evers . Baldwin also published a collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man , around this time.

In his 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone , Baldwin returned to popular themes — sexuality, family and the Black experience. Some critics panned the novel, calling it a polemic rather than a novel. He was also criticized for using the first-person singular, the "I," for the book's narration.

Later Works and Death

By the early 1970s, Baldwin seemed to despair over the racial situation. He had witnessed so much violence in the previous decade — especially the assassinations of Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — caused by racial hatred.

This disillusionment became apparent in his work, which employed a more strident tone than in earlier works. Many critics point to No Name in the Street , a 1972 collection of essays, as the beginning of the change in Baldwin's work. He also worked on a screenplay around this time, trying to adapt The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley for the big screen.

While his literary fame faded somewhat in his later years, Baldwin continued to produce new works in a variety of forms. He published a collection of poems, Jimmy's Blues: Selected Poems , in 1983 as well as the 1987 novel Harlem Quartet .

Baldwin also remained an astute observer of race and American culture. In 1985, he wrote The Evidence of Things Not Seen about the Atlanta child murders . Baldwin also spent years sharing his experiences and views as a college professor. In the years before his death, he taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College .

Baldwin died on December 1, 1987, at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France. Never wanting to be a spokesperson or a leader, Baldwin saw his personal mission as bearing "witness to the truth." He accomplished this mission through his extensive, rapturous literary legacy.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: James Baldwin
• Birth Year: 1924
• Birth date: August 2, 1924
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: Harlem
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: James Baldwin was an essayist, playwright, novelist and voice of the American civil rights movement known for works including 'Notes of a Native Son,' 'The Fire Next Time' and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain.'
• Politics and Government
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Writing and Publishing
• Fiction and Poetry
• Education and Academia
• Theater and Dance
• Civil Rights
• Astrological Sign: Leo
• DeWitt Clinton High School
• The New School
• Death Year: 1987
• Death date: December 1, 1987
• Death City: Saint-Paul de Vence
• Death Country: France

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An extract from James Baldwin’s classic essay ‘Many Thousands Gone”

In this passage taken from his 1955 collection Notes of a Native Son , the iconic writer examines what it means to be Black, and the ways in which myth and history lay heavily upon it.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in hieroglyphics; it is revealed in Negro speech and in that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference. The ways in which the Negro has affected the American psychology are betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our estrangement from him is the depth of our estrangement from ourselves. We cannot ask: what do we really feel about him — such a question merely opens the gates on chaos. What we really feel about him is involved with all that we feel about everything, about everyone, about ourselves.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America ­— or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans.  It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty. The Negro in America, gloomily referred to as that shadow which lies athwart our national life, is far more than that. He is a series of shadows, self-created, intertwining, which now we helplessly battle. One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds.

"The story of the Negro in America is the story of America — or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story"

Today, to be sure, we know that the Negro is not biologically or mentally inferior; there is no truth in those rumors of his body odor or his incorrigible sexuality; or no more truth than can be easily explained or even defended by the social sciences. Yet, in our most recent war, his blood was segregated as was, for the most part, his person. Up to today we are set at a division, so that he may not marry our daughters or our sisters, nor may he — for the most part — eat at our table or live in our houses. Moreover, those who do, do so at the grave expense of a double alienation: from their own people, whose fabled attributes they must either deny or, worse, cheapen and bring to market; from us, for we require of them, when we accept them, that they at once cease to be Negroes and yet not fail to remember what being a Negro means — to remember, that is, what it means to us. The threshold of insult is higher or lower, according to the people involved, from the bootblack in Atlanta to the celebrity in New York. One must travel very far, among saints with nothing to gain or outcasts with nothing to lose, to find a place where it does not matter — and perhaps a word or a gesture or simply a silence will testify that it matters even there.

For it means something to be a Negro, after all, as it means something to have been born in Ireland or in China, to live where one sees space and sky or to live where one sees nothing but rubble or nothing but high buildings. We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key — could we but find it — to all that we later become. What it means to be a Negro is a good deal more than this essay can discover; what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him.

Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead, their places taken by a group of amazingly well-adjusted young men and women, almost as dark, but ferociously literate, well-dressed and scrubbed, who are never laughed at, who are not likely ever to set foot in a cotton or tobacco field or in any but the most modern of kitchens. There are others who remain, in our odd idiom, “underprivileged”; some are bitter and these come to grief; some are unhappy, but, continually presented with the evidence of a better day soon to come, are speedily becoming less so. Most of them care nothing whatever about race. They want only their proper place in the sun and the right to be left alone, like any other citizen of the republic. We may all breathe more easily. Before, however, our joy at the demise of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom approaches the indecent, we had better ask whence they sprang, how they lived? Into what limbo have they vanished?

"What it means to be a Negro can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him"

The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land. This problem has been faced by all Americans throughout our history — in a way it is our history — and it baffles the immigrant and sets on edge the second generation until today. In the case of the Negro the past was taken from him whether he would or no; yet to forswear it was meaningless and availed him nothing, since his shameful history was carried, quite literally, on his brow. Shameful; for he was heathen as well as black and would never have discovered the healing blood of Christ had not we braved the jungles to bring him these glad tidings. Shameful; for, since our role as missionary had not been wholly disinterested, it was necessary to recall the shame from which we had delivered him in order more easily to escape our own. As he accepted the alabaster Christ and the bloody cross — in the bearing of which he would find his redemption, as, indeed, to our outraged astonishment, he sometimes did — he must, henceforth, accept that image we then gave him of himself: having no other and standing, moreover, in danger of death should he fail to accept the dazzling light thus brought into such darkness. It is this quite simple dilemma that must be borne in mind if we wish to comprehend his psychology.

However we shift the light which beats so fiercely on his head, or  prove , by victorious social analysis, how his lot has changed, how we have both improved, our uneasiness refuses to be exorcized. And nowhere is this more apparent than in our literature on the subject — “problem” literature when written by whites, “protest” literature when written by Negroes — and nothing is more striking than the tremendous disparity of tone between the two creations.  Kingsblood Royal  bears, for example, almost no kinship to  If He Hollers Let Him Go , though the same reviewers praised them both for what were, at bottom, very much the same reasons. These reasons may be suggested, far too briefly but not at all unjustly, by observing that the presupposition is in both novels exactly the same: black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world.

Now the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America is unquestionably Richard Wright’s Native Son . The feeling which prevailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter, uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very existence, of what strides might be taken in a free democracy, and its indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts. Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. Such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before — which was true. Nor could it be written today.  It bears already the aspect of a landmark; for Bigger and his brothers have undergone yet another metamorphosis; they have been accepted in baseball leagues and by colleges hitherto exclusive; and they have made a most favorable appearance on the national screen. We have yet to encounter, nevertheless, a report so indisputably authentic, or one that can begin to challenge this most significant novel.

It is, in a certain American tradition, the story of an unremarkable youth in battle with the force of circumstance; that force of circumstance which plays and which has played so important a part in the national fables of success or failure. In this case the force of circumstance is not poverty merely but color, a circumstance which cannot be overcome, against which the protagonist battles for his life and loses. It is, on the surface, remarkable that this book should have enjoyed among Americans the favor it did enjoy; no more remarkable, however, than that it should have been compared, exuberantly, to Dostoevsky, though placed a shade below Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Steinbeck; and when the book is examined, its impact does not seem remarkable at all, but becomes, on the contrary, perfectly logical and inevitable.

"To forswear the past was meaningless and availed him nothing, since his shameful history was carried, quite literally, on his brow"

We cannot, to begin with, divorce this book from the specific social climate of that time; it was one of the last of all through the thirties, dealing with the inequities of the social structure of America. It was published one year before our entry into the last world war — which is to say, very few years after the dissolution of the WPA and the end of the New Deal and at time when bread lines and soup kitchens and bloody industrial battles were bright in everyone’s memory. The rigors of that unexpected time filled us not only with a genuinely bewildered and despairing idealism — so that, because there at least was something to fight for, young men went off to die in Spain — but also with a genuinely bewildered self-consciousness.  The Negro, who had been during the magnificent twenties a passionate and delightful primitive, now became, as one of the things we were most self-conscious about, our most oppressed minority. In the thirties, swallowing Marx whole, we discovered the Worker and realized — I should think with some relief — that the aims of the Worker and the aims of the Negro were one. This theorem to which we shall return — seems now to leave rather too much out of account; it became, nevertheless, one of the slogans of the “class struggle” and the gospel of the New Negro.

As for this New Negro, it was Wright who became his most eloquent spokesman; and his work, from its beginning, is most clearly committed to the social struggle.  Leaving aside the considerable question of what relationship precisely the artist bears to the revolutionary, the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who has, moreover, as Wright had, the necessity thrust on him of being the representative of some thirteen million people. It is a false responsibility (since writers are not congressmen) and impossible, by its nature, of fulfillment. The unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far from being able to feed the hungry sheep, he has lost the wherewithal for his own nourishment; having not been allowed — so fearful was his burden, so present his audience! — to recreate his own experience. Further, the militant men and women of the thirties were not, upon examination, significantly emancipated from their antecedents, however bitterly they might consider themselves estranged or however gallantly they struggle to build a better world. However they might extol Russia, their concept of a better world. However they might extol Russia, their concept of a better world was quite helplessly American and betrayed a certain thinness of imagination, a suspect reliance on suspect and badly digested formulae, and a positively fretful romantic haste. Finally, the relationship of the Negro to the Worker cannot be summed up, nor even greatly illuminated, by saying that their aims are one.  It is true only insofar as they both desire better working conditions and useful only insofar as they unite their strength as workers to achieve these ends. Further than this we cannot in honest go.

In this climate Wright’s voice first was heard and the struggle which promised for a time to shape his work and give it purpose also fixed it in an ever more unrewarding rage. Recording his days of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before to, had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro: that fantastic and fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash. 

This is an extract from 'Notes of a Native Son' by James Baldwin.

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Native Son exploded on the American literary scene in 1940. The story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in the raw, noisy, crowded slums of Chicago’s South Side, captured the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of black Americans with an unprecedented intensity and vividness. The text printed in this volume restores the changes and cuts—including the replacement of an entire scene—that Wright was forced to make by book club editors who feared offending their readers. The unexpurgated version of Wright’s electrifying novel shows his determination to write honestly about his controversial protagonist. As he wrote in the essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” which accompanies the novel: “I became convinced that if I did not write Bigger as I saw and felt him, I’d be acting out of fear.”

This volume also contains Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today! , published posthumously in 1963, and his collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children , which appeared in 1938. Lawd Today! interweaves news bulletins, songs, exuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the events of one day—February 12—in the life of a black Chicago postal worker. The text for this edition reinstates Wright’s stylistic experiments, and the novel emerges as a far livelier work of the imagination.

Uncle Tom’s Children first brought Wright to national attention when it received the Story Prize for the best work submitted to the Federal Writers’ Project. The characters in these tales struggle to survive the cruelty of racism in the South, as Wright asks “what quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity.” All five stories Wright included in the 1940 second edition are published in this volume, along with his sardonic autobiographical essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.”

Richard Wright was “forged in injustice as a sword is forged,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. With passionate honesty and courage, he confronted the terrible effects of prejudice and intolerance and created works that explore the deepest conflicts of the human heart.

This Library of America edition presents for the first time Wright’s works in the form in which he intended them to be read. The authoritative new texts, based on Wright’s original typescripts and proofs, reveal the full range and power of his achievement as an experimental stylist and as a fiery prophet of the tragic consequences of racism in American society. The volume includes notes on significant changes in Wright’s text and a detailed chronology of his life.

Arnold Rampersad , volume editor, is Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and a member of the Department of English at Stanford University. He has written biographies of Langston Hughes (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), Jackie Robinson, and, most recently, Ralph Ellison.

Richard Wright: Early Works is kept in print by a gift from Charles Ackerman to the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

“With the appearance of the two-volume Richard Wright: Works , published by The Library of America and edited and annotated by Arnold Rampersad, we have a new opportunity to assess Wright’s formidable and lasting contribution to American literature. But this time we have texts intended as the author originally wished them to be read. The works that millions know are, as it turns out, expurged and abbreviated versions of what Wright submitted for publication.” — Charles Johnson, The Chicago Tribune

Buy all three Baldwin volumes and save $42.50.

With such landmark novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room , and the essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time , James Baldwin established himself as the indispensable literary voice of the Civil Rights era, a figure whose prophetic exploration of the racial and sexual fissures in American society challenged and electrified American readers. But by the late 1960s and ’70s many regarded Baldwin as being out of sync with the political and social currents transforming America: too integrationist for the champions of “Black Power” and others on the Left, yet too “pessimistic” for many white readers. As a result his final three novels— Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979)—have yet to receive the consideration given his earlier fiction. Now, these late novels, carefully annotated to clarify Baldwin’s many musical and other cultural references, are collected for the first time in a single-volume edition, a companion volume to The Library of America’s Early Novels and Stories .

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone , inspired in part by Baldwin’s unhappy experience collaborating with the Actors Studio for the staging of one of his plays, begins with the sudden heart attack of its thirty-nine-year-old protagonist, the celebrated actor Leo Proudhammer, whose rise to fame from impoverished beginnings in Harlem is recounted as he recuperates. Although wholly fictional, it is a profoundly personal work, as Proudhammer’s conflicted assessment of his life and career mirror Baldwin’s own struggles in the mid-1960s. If Beale Street Could Talk , the only Baldwin novel narrated by a woman, is a love story in which a young couple must weather a false accusation of rape and the predatory misconduct of the police. Baldwin’s final novel, the sprawling Just Above My Head , follows the troubled life and tumultuous times of world-famous gospel singer Arthur Montana; here Baldwin’s continued critical engagement with the African American church and with black music, begun decades earlier with Go Tell It on the Mountain , brings his career full circle.

Darryl Pinckney , editor, is the author of the novel High Cotton (1992) and the critical study Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books , among other publications.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

The stirring and provocative final three novels by the literary voice of the Civil Rights era

“If you wanted a poem,” wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, “you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.” From the life of Chicago’s South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.

“Her formal range,” writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, “is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso.” That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry retains its power to move and surprise.

Elizabeth Alexander , editor of this volume, is the author of four books of poems, most recently American Sublime , and the essay collection The Black Interior. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks. She is a professor at Yale University.

About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

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“The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review , “found eloquent expression in [Baldwin’s] novels. His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence.

His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin’s own experience, of a preacher’s son coming of age in 1930’s Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as “an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us.”

Giovanni’s Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America’s racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin’s most ambitious novel.

Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin’s short fiction, including the masterful “Sonny’s Blues,” the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

Toni Morrison , volume editor, was the author of numerous award–winning novels, including Love , Jazz , Song of Solomon , Sula , The Bluest Eye , and Beloved , which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. From 1989 to 2006 she was Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012.

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories is kept in print by a gift from Frank A. Bennack Jr. to the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

“James Baldwin’s gift to our literary tradition is that rarest of treasures, a rhetoric of fiction and the essay that is, at once, Henry Jamesian and King Jamesian.” — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This landmark two-volume anthology chronicles more than thirty tumultuous years in the African American struggle for freedom and equal rights. Here, in brilliant and inspiring dispatches from some of the finest reporters in the history of American journalism, is a panoramic portrait of the fight to overthrow segregation in the United States. Nearly 200 newspaper and magazine reports, book excerpts, and features by 151 writers—David Halberstam, Carl Rowan, Robert Penn Warren, Gordon Parks, Ralph Ellison, and Anne Moody among them—provide vivid firsthand accounts of all the revolutionary events: the rising activism of the 1940s; the Brown decision; the Montgomery bus boycott; Little Rock; the sit-in movement and Freedom Rides; Birmingham, the March on Washington (August 28, 1963), Freedom Summer, and Selma; and the emergence of “Black Power.”

Each volume contains a detailed chronology of the civil rights movement, biographical profiles of the journalists, notes, an index, and thirty-two pages of photographs, many never before published.

The advisory board for Reporting Civil Rights includes Clayborne Carson , senior editor, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. ; David J. Garrow , Presidential Distinguished Professor, Emory University; Bill Kovach , chairman, Committee of Concerned Journalists; and Carol Polsgrove , professor of journalism, Indiana University.

“If only civil rights were taught this way in our classrooms! Personal narratives, together with gripping newspaper accounts and essays written between 1941 and 1973, make the two-volume Reporting Civil Rights a vital national resource.”— O: The Oprah Magazine

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A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

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Reading James Baldwin in an Election Year

T he evening James Baldwin stood in the pulpit of a New Orleans church in 1963, he carried little more than a single sheet of paper with his sporadic handwriting in blue ink on it. He began as he had always done: In silence, being engulfed by the applause of the room. A sort of expectation each one has arrived with.

In a picture taken of him that evening by photographer Mario Jorrin, Baldwin's body stood erect. He wears a dark suit. A white shirt, a black tie, and bends his chin toward the podium. The ceiling of the sanctuary seemed to climb toward the heavens as people stood crowded along the walls. There was hardly any room, a thing Baldwin had become used to since releasing The Fire Next Time earlier that year. That night, the faces of the attendees would bend toward one another—some laughed, some were stern, some were focused on the man at the pulpit, and others stared into nothing. They had all come to hear “God’s Black revolutionary mouth,” as Amiri Baraka called Baldwin.

Read More: James Baldwin Insisted We Tell the Truth About This Country. The Truth Is, We’ve Been Here Before

Baldwin’s frame was small, his clothes often hugged his skin. In most pictures that I have laying in my house, Baldwin smiles. I have chosen this for a reason. For years, it seemed that we have only known the angry Baldwin. That Baldwin’s thunderous appeal was only meant to break us down until we have nothing left. A foolish thing to believe any lover would do. There are four pictures, actually, four in which his cheeks spread far until they show his teeth. And yet, I know this too is a created thing. I have wanted to see him smile more than he cries. I have wanted to see him happy rather than sad. But I cannot deny this: that evening, Baldwin carried more than a paper and pen. He carried a broken heart.

A soul-crushing anguish that things at home—and in the years since leaving Harlem—would not change. An anguish that almost emptied him of keeping the faith. A painful feeling that also travels from the center of my chest this morning and the morning before that and the morning before that. “Four AM can be a devastating hour,” Baldwin writes. The clock reads 4:32am. I have just taken a sip of the gunpowder green tea, have just finished the last page of John Hersey’s 1946 essay “Hiroshima,” have read the last line—"They were looking for their mothers"—three times, underlined it with black ink that bleeds through the next page, and have become more determined, as Baldwin has, “to bear the light.”

If you are like me and are concerned with history, grief, failure, and goodness—and the way each is woven together when we tell the story of how things unfold in our lives and the lives of others—then you, too, have stared at that black and white image. You have studied James Baldwin’s hands and his eyes, remembering that the year 1963 crawls in his psyche like a never-ending plague that overworks the ventricles of the heart. You have turned to the chronology in your well-worn copy of Baldwin’s collected essays edited by Toni Morrison and see that the year 1963 was full of travel and meetings and reportings on lynching and dancing and trembling.

In the midst of all of this travel, you would realize that Baldwin had been hospitalized for what doctors call “exhaustion.” That he felt it impossible to stop because of the demands of the world. That he felt it impossible not to speak because of his broken heart. That “exhaustion” is but another word for love when you are deemed unloveable and invaluable and have refused to believe it. That you feel what Baldwin has felt and therefore have taken his essays with you everywhere because a well-worn copy of essays is somewhat an indicator of a mind that wrestles, a heart that moves, and a body that feels.

I, too, have wondered about the same world , some 60 years later, with the same type of dying in and around us. As I write these words, I am sitting at my desk at home while my daughter, Ava, is asleep upstairs. The news says the numbers of children, women, and men dead in Gaza has eclipsed almost 30,000. The streets in New York and Washington, D.C. have been filled with people crying for justice . In January, President Joe Biden stood at the pulpit at Mother Emmanuel AME , where a protester demanded a ceasefire, and the crowd responds “Four more years,” silencing the cries for dignity and protection. A few weeks before that, a rabbi stood in a crowd of people demanding the same and was met with, “Get out of here!” Neighborhoods have been flattened. Aid has been cut off. Hatred is growing . Politicians are in denial about whether or not this country was born out of anti-Black racism . I find it hard to feel anything wondering what would come of this next election year.

How do we grieve where we are now when so much has been lost? It’s in these moments that I think about Baldwin often—that I feel Baldwin’s heart and mind can be a creative force to give me the hope that I often don’t feel and the courage to allow my heartbreak to break me open instead of close me up. I think that if there is anyone to lead us through an election year—to help us ask the right questions, make the right demands, fight the good fight, and stay human—it is James Baldwin.

I think of 1963, a year that is everything but a normal year in American history. By January, the same month Baldwin wrote his intimate and thunderous appeal, 16,000 American military personnel were deployed to South Vietnam in an unjust war . By February, the fiery napalm and smoke incinerated both the bodies and fields along the Perfume River. By April, 90-year old Dorothy Bell waited for a table that never came and was eventually arrested. By May, police dogs were ripping into the rib cage of a 70-year-old black man in protest. By June, Medgar Ever ’s back was split open as he bled to death in front of his wife and children. By August, burnt crosses stood illuminating the doorstops of a black family who moved into an all white neighborhood. By September, some 19 sticks of dynamite shredded the ligaments of five black girls, killing them instantly, and injuring some 20, blowing out the face of the stained glass Christ that sat behind the choir’s seating.

Read More: How Liberal White America Turned Its Back on James Baldwin in the 1960s

I have studied the image that Jorrin had taken of Baldwin that same year. The image is silent. Baldwin does not smile. His hands do not move. And yet, the image is as loud as the words he wrote in his 1963 letter to his nephew, “the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.”

I have been thinking a lot about this image and the 60 years that has passed since this moment. The facts are this: the world is neither more safe or more healed than when he left it. The world is neither more loving or more honest or more healthy than when he was born in it. The same racism, hatred, death, and religious bigotry that Baldwin wanted us freed of in his time destroys us in our time. And yet, there is something about our time that feels different. (I am partly tired of hearing people say this moment is unprecedented because, you know, looking back through history, things have always been bad. But a part of me wonders if they are not the foolish ones, but me.) It feels different because the forces that want the world to stay the same are growing stronger. And at the same time, the inner willingness to believe that things can change, is growing deeper.

This image lingers because I too stand behind the sacred desk declaring the good news of God’s love and liberation. I too return to the blank page to feel, as Baldwin says, “what it is like to be alive.”

If there is anything that on my part and in these days that I have crawled back to, it is the way that Baldwin, as Morrison wrote in her eulogy to him, gave us language to articulate our perils, to deeply understand our place in the world not simply as humans but as people who come from a battered and worn and complex history. None of the villains and heroes in Baldwin’s mind seem quite black and white. Baldwin knew that villainy, especially of the American kind that is so double-minded and unstable in our ways about what matters and who counts, is not a given. It is chosen. And if it is chosen, then we can choose the better. This better, Morrison so beautifully articulates, is the way Baldwin so fearlessly and tenderly laid out of condition and the redemptive energy that lays at the center of it. “You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it,” Morrison wrote. “and ungated it for black people, so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passions.” For Morrison, Baldwin was more than anything, full of that sacred wisdom, courage, and love that leaves us both to “witness the pain you had witnessed” and yet “tough enough to bear while it broke your heart.”

I have found myself being most concerned as of late with the things that broke Baldwin’s heart. It is not because I am obsessed with the dark side of the man who gave so much of his energy in 1963 to do what he must to make us more whole and honest and loving. It is because some 60 years later, it seems as if, on the one hand, we are so obsessed with running from grief that to deal with it is to almost give up hope because of the mountain of moral failure we feel we have to climb. And then on the other, we are living in a country where people seem to be addicted to the suffering of others.

They do not care whether your body or your brain is exhausted , they only desire your labor. They do not care whether you are you have rights or freedoms, they only care that they have them and have the power to take yours away. They do not care about your children or their children or this planet or the past or the present or the future. They only care about now and harming as many people now with as little accountability as possible.

There are days, I wonder if any of us can survive all of this. I wonder if seeing images of dead children, rage-filled desires to shred our common humanity, social media’s constant altering of our own self-image and love, the eroding of social trust and morality, the lying, the greed, the bigotry, the sleepless nights, all of it—I wonder if we can survive it.

American society for all its declarations of freedom and justice had become nothing more than empty promises and empty hopes and a “series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors, ” Baldwin wrote in October 1963, in a talk to teachers . The citizen who calls into question those, like the Good Samaritan story in the Christian Scriptures, who pass by people in need is not championed but silenced and erased. This was a cruelty, in Baldwin’s mind, of the highest order. Take the Black child and the Black adults fight for their freedom. “It is not really a Negro Revolution that is upsetting this country,” he wrote. “What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity.” For many in his time and even now 60 years later, the same thing is true: there is a fight to violently hold on to “American” meaning white and Christian and straight and male. For all the talk of America being a “Christian nation,” it was not just a lie, but the term “Christian nation” had become a weapon. This, too, was a deep and depressing cruelty.

Throughout his talk, Baldwin kept alluding to this idea of bad faith both as a way of being together but also bad faith as a way of living. “We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation,” he says. “It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church …my father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way.”

When I read that line, I couldn’t help but think of what is happening right now in this country. I have thought so hard and so often about how sad it is that we live in a country where Christians have the most power, but believe they are experiencing the most pain. It’s sad that we have become so empty of not just compassion but of mercy, kindness, wisdom, and goodness. As I’ve flipped through my underlined pages of Baldwin’s text, I shook my head side to side and came to this conclusion:if anybody is making it hard to be an American and a Christian, it is Christians.

“All of these means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet,” Baldwin posits. Sadly, that bitterness has now shown up in the most destructive and deceptive ways. And yet, that is not all Baldwin had seen. When the mind is confused, full of doubt, and discouragement, the eye must be insistent in its power to see.

After having talked about the teacher and student’s responsibility to do what we must to responsibly love one another, Baldwin turns particularly to say a word about what he would say to a black child if he were to teach them day in and day out. He would teach them that the environments that they have been forced into is not of their own doing, but that of a power that has sought to destroy them. There are no “good” kids or “bad” kids ultimately, only the conditions that mark them as such and rob the “bad” kids of their humanity and dignity.

He would teach them that their lives, their art, their history, and their story is greater than the ways this country believes them to be backward and nothing. He would teach them that the stereotypes of the world are powerful and yet not ultimate. And then the famous line: “I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger—and that it belongs to him.”

Read More: James Baldwin and the Trap Of Our History

I have read this line and thought of my own two children. I think of all children, truly. Children who are black as my own. Children who are Palestinian. Children who are Jewish. Children who are Asian. Children who are Hispanic, and gay and straight and athletic and quirky and in wealthy districts and left behind in enclaves. I think of them so much because, as one African proverb says, the health of the nation is dependent on the condition of its children.

I think of their growing minds and the fears that I have of what they will have to enter. How little do they know what actually awaits them and how furiously I have stayed up into the late hours of the night either praying or reading or writing in some way to prepare them. I think of my own upbringing. Our small plot of land. How little was expected of us and how much of this world we both endured and made. As a parent, I have found so much peace in those last six words: “and it belongs to him.”

Two nights ago, as I sat alone at my table reading over his talk for the third time, I took a sip of my chamomile tea as I listened to Hammock’s “We Watched You Disappear” in the background. The outside had darkened as the clouds from today’s rain passed over. I walked upstairs, noticing the chill bounce of the walls. I kiss both of my children on their foreheads as they sleep. I walk downstairs, walk back to my office, and stare at another picture from 1963 of Baldwin during his travels.

In the picture, his arms form in the position of a “T” as his body bounces side to side. The walls are bright. A painting which looks to depict an ancient time hangs on the wall. Baldwin’s eyes hang downward as the cracks of his lips widen. Doris Castle, an active organizer on the front lines of the Civil Right movement with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) stands in front of Baldwin with her torso forward, her arms like a bird’s wings, her right thumb toward the ceiling and her left index finger holding a cigarette. It was the same year that Castle protested a segregated New Orleans City Hall cafeteria. It was the same year that Baldwin went on a crusade to change the heart of the nation. In the photo, he smiles. She dances. It is said that both of them are doing the “Hitch Hike”—a dance popularized the year before with Marvin Gaye’s 1962 hit by the same name. The dance goes like this: thumb out, start to the right, four count, one, two, three, four, throw the shoulder back, left thumb out, start to the left, five, six, seven, eight, bend down, roll the hands, and turn to the left and turn to the right. And then again and then again until you are so lost together that you almost forget that a hitch hiker is a person in desperation, putting themselves in danger, hoping that they arrive where they desire as whole.

There is room made in the world, the burning and bleeding world of 1963, to dance and be joyful. There are times I wonder, as I look at this picture of both Baldwin and Castle, if their dancing kept them going. I wonder if it was their movement that let them know that their lives were more than just producing things and fighting things. To know that their existence is enough. To know that whatever good they did out there was a reflection of the good they protected in their hearts.

I have no answer to that question but something about these two images—Baldwin preaching his good news in the church and dancing his heart happy in a home—remind me that Baldwin left more than a broken heart. He left us a beating heart. “My ancestors counseled me to keep the faith : and I promised, I vowed, that I would,” he wrote. I, too, have made that vow. I, too, have watched my own children dance, twirl their bodies around the dying grass, laughing and holding hands. I, too, have watched people take the streets once again to say to the world: if they can’t be free, then we can’t be free. I, too, have watched the artist and poets among us move their tender fingers toward the keyboard and the page, determined to create against all hope. I, too, have watched how we have done something as simple as cried at the sight of one human being helping another, trusting that every good deed can be multiplied. A broken heart isn’t the only type of heart.

There is also a heart that with every act of courage, tenderness, vulnerability, kindness, and mercy, moves forward.

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The Brilliance in James Baldwin’s Letters

The famous author, who would have been 100 years old today, was best known for his novels and essays. But correspondence was where his light shone brightest.

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“My dear Mr. Meeropol,” the correspondence begins. “Your letter is completely unanswerable because it drags up out of darkness, and confirms, so much.” It was the fall of 1974, and the accolades for If Beale Street Could Talk —his novel depicting a love story interrupted by incarceration—still wreathed all of James Baldwin’s moves. For the moment, he was one of the most famous writers in America. Yet, in the middle of it all, Baldwin took the time to respond to his high-school English teacher Abel Meeropol, an author in his own right who, under the pen name Lewis Allan, wrote the poem “Strange Fruit,” later recorded by Billie Holiday.

Meeropol had reached out to his former student, the “small boy with big eyes,” to reminisce on their time in the classroom. His letter recalled that during one exercise, Baldwin had decided to write a winter scene by describing “the houses in their little white overcoats,” a delightful detail that presaged a career full of delightful details. In the humblest possible manner, Meeropol also shared his own work, including his titanic poem, which had by that time become the Black American protest song.

Raoul Peck: James Baldwin was right all along

Baldwin proceeded to answer the missive that he had called unanswerable. “I don’t remember what you remember,” he wrote, “but if I wrote the line which you remember, then I must have trusted you.” He continued, “I hope you’ll write me again, and I promise to answer.”

Having read through dozens of Baldwin’s letters, which are mostly housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, I know that this kind of promise was not an idle one for Baldwin. The archive is full of his exchanges with celebrities, activists, fans, and fellow literati. Alongside T he Fire Next Time , they form an epistolary canon that is, in the main, much less well known than his essays, novels, and plays. But on the occasion of what would have been Baldwin’s 100th birthday, consider that letters were actually the form where his light shone brightest. Baldwin’s correspondence showcases that which still makes him a special read today: a belief in the power of human connection to change the world.

Many letters to Baldwin begin with the same salutation: “Dear Jimmy.” He was approachable—both close friends and new acquaintances used the intimate greeting—even as he prompted a deep sense of respect. Those who’d never written to him before nonetheless felt a certain familiarity, while those who regularly wrote to him remained eager for his approval and love.

This duality is evident in letters from the author Alex Haley, then best known for his The Autobiography of Malcolm X . Haley and Baldwin struck up a close correspondence in the late 1960s, one in which Haley often pressed Baldwin to allow him the honor of becoming Baldwin’s biographer; Baldwin tried to gently dissuade Haley from the endeavor. The two also tried to make plans to adapt Haley’s work on Malcolm X for the stage. One gets the sense in their letters that Haley tried hard to impress his friend. During one meeting, Baldwin complimented Haley’s luggage, so Haley had a set sent to him. (It’s not clear whether Baldwin received the set; Haley acquired the proper address from Baldwin’s assistant, and yet the packages were returned to their sender, without the luggage.) 

Haley also felt compelled to share with Baldwin the research that would lead to his most famous work, Roots . “Dear Jimmy,” Haley wrote in 1967. “I went through over 1100 itineraries of slave ships, and I found her, unquestionably—the ship that brought over my forebear Kunta Kinte.” Although Haley would go on to invent much of the purported history presented in Roots , his earnest excitement—and the fact that he’d wanted to share the moment with Baldwin—is a small treasure of the archive.

There are other treats as well. Baldwin often invited his friends, including Haley, to visit during his frequent sojourns in Istanbul. One such guest was the actor Marlon Brando, who had been one of Baldwin’s dearest companions since their college days. Brando came on “a mission which was unclear,” according to Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming, one that saw him hounded by much publicity. Brando abruptly traveled back to the States, leaving behind only a note dashed off on hotel letterhead. “Dear Jim, just had to split,” he wrote. “The press are like flies in the outhouse.”

James Baldwin, ghosted! His international friendships were full of comings and goings—a strange combination of aloofness and yearning. Writing to Lena Horne in 1973, he invited the world-famous jazz singer to a Christmas Eve special he was planning that was to be broadcast for incarcerated people. “I think the show might be important,” he told Horne. But the real prize would be an opportunity for the two to catch up. “Please get in touch with me as quickly as you can,” he wrote. “And please remember dear lady, that this strange solitary distant man loves you very much and will always love you.”

James Baldwin: This morning, this evening, so soon

Baldwin was a caretaker within his friend group of Black intellectuals and performers, a role that they treasured in their notes to him. Nina Simone, for whom Baldwin had served as a mentor and confidant, wrote to him in 1977, while he was living in the south of France and she in Geneva. Both were in their own kinds of exile, reeling from disillusionment with the racial order in America. Simone had recently fled America in the face of mounting tax bills and was estranged from her husband, who managed her money. But her sunny letter inviting her dear Jimmy to a series of her shows in Paris illustrated his capacity for lifting spirits. “I need to hear from you man! I’m very homesick,” she wrote. “P.S. I wear your scarf all the time.”

Baldwin wrote to Lorraine Hansberry, to Ray Charles, to Maya Angelou. He was one of the people who encouraged a young Black editor at Random House to try her hand at novels. That editor, Toni Morrison, later bemoaned having to pass on Beale Street , writing in her own letter to Baldwin, “It is so beautiful that I wanted to cover it, touch it, promote it, be knowledgeable about it—you know become an If Beale Street Could Talk groupie.” Baldwin was always encouraging his comrades to create, to continue bringing new work into the world. This propensity took on a special significance after the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr . In various letters from this period, Baldwin prayed that his generation of writers and artists might dare to persist.

Even in his private correspondence, Baldwin believed in the power of the word to change the world. Regarding assassinations and grief, he jotted down a letter to then–Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 after the assassination of his older brother President John F. Kennedy. Baldwin wrote on behalf of himself, Hansberry, Horne, and Harry Belafonte, who together had met earlier that year with the younger Kennedy to try to push the administration to more openly support civil rights. Baldwin proved as calculating as he was consoling, imploring Bobby Kennedy to fight on in his brother’s memory. “Death, as we know, is in one way absolutely final; in another, as we know, and as human history proves, it affords the greatest of all challenges to the human spirit,” Baldwin wrote. “A number of our most massive achievements have been snatched from the jaws of death—by we, the living, whose burden of opportunity it is to carry forward the work for which our fallen comrades died.” Kennedy evidently took the group’s words to heart, becoming a stalwart protector of civil rights during his tenure as attorney general and an ally of the movement during his ill-fated presidential campaign.

Baldwin frequently endeavored to turn his epistolary power into action—the man loved an open letter . In 1970, as mail from across the country poured into the New York Women’s Detention Center in support of the activist Angela Davis, who was incarcerated there while facing murder charges, Baldwin added his own letter to the torrent. In his missive, later published in the New York Review of Books , the influence of Black Power on his evolving worldview was clear. “We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have,” he told Davis. “The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America.”

Read: The famous Baldwin-Buckley debate still matters today

In 1974, Baldwin again hoped to use his letters to indict the system . That year, after President Gerald Ford controversially pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, for Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal, Nelson Rockefeller—the previous governor of New York and incoming vice president—applauded his new partner’s decision as “an act of conscience, compassion, and courage.” In an open letter he seemed to have wanted published by Newsweek , Baldwin excoriated Rockefeller. “If Mr. Rockefeller judges Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon ‘an act of conscience, compassion, and courage,’” he wrote, “then there are American citizens who would like to be informed as to how he judges the no-knock, ‘stop-and-frisk’ laws he, as the governor of New York, instituted in New York State.” Baldwin continued: “This particular American citizen would also like to have described that ‘conscience, compassion, and courage’ which led to the slaughter at Attica,” referring to the 1971 prison uprising that Rockefeller sent police to crush, resulting in the killing of more than 30 men.

Baldwin’s two most famous letters, the two parts of The Fire Next Time , exemplify his masterful use of the form to create intimacy with—and generate empathy in—readers. Their enormous influence, then and now, has inspired an epistolary tradition in the Black literary canon. But I’m most interested in the ways that those same tools inspired Baldwin’s readers in their own lives, and how many of those readers felt compelled to send him letters. Alongside the requests for autographs or photographs are notes that reveal the deeply felt impact of his work on average Americans. “I am just writing you to let you know that your writings have penetrated my being,” one fan wrote in 1973. In 1977, another correspondent wrote that “without reservation,” Baldwin was “one of the five greatest novelists and literatists of this age.” One woman, writing on stationery adorned by a sketch of a rabbit, said that she’d read Beale Street in a single sitting, and that “the last two hours that I have lived in this book have engulfed me with a humbleness that will never leave me.”

My favorite letter in the Baldwin archive, written by hand from a fan in Pittsburgh, regards Beale Street . The writer describes sharing the novel with the man they love, who is incarcerated. “He says he loves all your writing as much as I do,” the letter reads. “And more than that, much more than that, it hasn’t been until I wrote to him about this book that he’s written that he loves me too. It’s like just knowing someone as important and powerful as you are could write seriously about people like us, divided by jails, gave him a new sense of hope, of belief in himself again.” Baldwin’s work may have shaken America’s foundations, but this letter illustrates how his ability to peer into people’s inner lives mattered just as much. He cultivated beauty, even in the bleakest situations, and it often bore fruit.

There are dozens more letters to sift through: love letters, family business, more fan mail, official publishing business, Baldwin’s unusually graceful rejection notes for requests he couldn’t accommodate. In all, they do just as much as Baldwin’s literary works to help explain and diagnose America’s ills. They also help elucidate the ineffable something that makes his work special. Baldwin’s letters closed the distance between past and present, Black and white, prison and the outside, person and person. His elegance is matched only by his humility and care. As with Baldwin’s novels and essays, his letters evince a genuine love for humanity that not even the frustrations and sorrows of the post-civil-rights era could fully extinguish. For Baldwin, the letter was an act of optimism, a bet on the possibility of people seeing themselves in the other.

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James Baldwin: ‘I Never Intended to Become an Essayist’

From a classic interview with david c. estes.

As essayist, James Baldwin has written about life in Harlem, Paris, Atlanta; about Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jimmie Carter; and about Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Norman Mailer. In examining contemporary culture, he has turned his attention to politics, literature, the movies—and most importantly to his own self. To each subject he has brought the conviction, stated in the 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village,” that “the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too.” Thus he has consistently chosen as his audience Americans, both black and white, and has offered them instruction about the failings and possibilities of their unique national society.

Several of the essays in Notes of a Native Son (1955), published two years after his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , are regarded as contemporary classics because of their polished style and timeless insights. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 marks his long, productive career as an essayist. It includes over forty shorter pieces as well as three book-length essays— The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976). Baldwin’s most recent book is The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), a meditation on the Atlanta child-murder case. It is his troubled and troubling personal reencounter with “the terror of being destroyed” that dominates the inescapable memories of his own early life in America.

David C. Estes : Why did you take on the project to write about Wayne Williams and the Atlanta child murders? What did you expect to find when you began the research for The Evidence of Things Not Seen?

James Baldwin : It was thrown into my lap. I had not thought about doing it at all. My friend Walter Lowe of Playboy wrote me in the south of France to think about doing an essay concerning this case, about which I knew very little. There had not been very much in the French press. So I didn’t quite know what was there, although it bugged me. I was a little afraid to do it, to go to Atlanta. Not because of Atlanta—I’d been there before—but because I was afraid to get involved in it and I wasn’t sure I wanted to look any further.

It was an ongoing case. The boy was in jail, and there were other developments in the city and among the parents and details which I’ve blotted out completely which drove me back to Atlanta several times to make sure I got the details right. The book is not a novel nor really an essay. It involves living, actual human beings. And there you get very frightened. You don’t want to make inaccuracies. It was the first time I had ever used a tape recorder. I got hours of tape. At one moment I thought I was going crazy. I went to six or seven or eight places where the bodies had been found. After the seventh or the eighth, I realized I couldn’t do that anymore.

DCE : There is a sense in the book that you were trying to keep your distance, especially from the parents of both the victims and the murderer. In fact, you state at one point in it that you “never felt more of an interloper, a stranger” in all of your journeys than you did in Atlanta while researching this case.

JB : It wasn’t so much that I was trying to keep my distance, although that is certainly true. It was an eerie moment when you realize that you always ask, “How are the kids?” I stopped asking. When I realized that, I realized I’m nuts. What are you going to say to the parents of a murdered child? You feel like an interloper when you walk in because no matter how gently you do it you are invading something. Grief, privacy, I don’t know how to put that. I don’t mean that they treated me that way. They were beautiful. But I felt that there was something sacred about it. One had to bury that feeling in order to do the project. It was deeper than an emotional reaction; I don’t have any word for it. It wasn’t that I was keeping my distance from the parents. I was keeping a distance from my own pain. The murder of children is the most indefensible form of murder that there is. It was certainly for me the most unimaginable. I can imagine myself murdering you in a rage, or my lover, or my wife. I can understand that, but I don’t understand how anyone can murder a child.

DCE : The carefully controlled structure of your earlier essays is absent from Evidence .

JB : I had to risk that. What form or shape could I give it? It was not something that I was carrying in my imagination. It was something quite beyond my imagination. All I really hoped to do was write a fairly coherent report in which I raised important questions. But the reader was not going to believe a word I said, so I had to suggest far more than I could state. I had to raise some questions without seeming to raise them. Some questions are unavoidably forbidden.

DCE : Because you are an accomplished novelist, why didn’t you use the approach of the New Journalism and tell the story of Wayne Williams by relying on the techniques of fiction?

JB : It doesn’t interest me, and I’ve read very little of it. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a very pretty performance, but in my mind it illustrates the ultimate pitfall of that particular approach. To put it in another way, when I write a play or a novel, I write the ending and am responsible for it. Tolstoy has every right to throw Anna Karenina under the train. She begins in his imagination, and he has to take responsibility for her until the reader does. But the life of a living human being, no one writes it. You cannot deal with another human being as though he were a fictional creation.

I couldn’t fictionalize the story of the Atlanta murders. It’s beyond my province and would be very close to blasphemy. I might be able to fictionalize it years from now when something has happened to me and I can boil down the residue of the eyes of some of the parents and some of the children. I’m sure that will turn up finally in fiction because it left such a profound mark on me. But in dealing with it directly as an event that was occurring from day to day, it did not even occur to me to turn it into fiction, which would have been beyond my power. It was an event which had been written by a much greater author than I.

Reflecting on the writing of the New Journalists, I think the great difficulty or danger is not to make the event an occasion for the exhibition of your virtuosity. You must look to the event.

DCE : In other words, style can take away from the event itself.

JB : In a way. I’m speaking only for myself, but I wouldn’t want to use the occasion of the children as an occasion to show off. I don’t think a writer ever should show off, anyway. Saul Bellow would say to me years and years ago, “Get that fancy footwork out of there.” The hardest part of developing a style is that you have to learn to trust your voice. If I thought of my style, I’d be crippled. Somebody else said to me a long time ago in France, “Find out what you can do, and then don’t do it.”

DCE : What has been the reaction to Evidence in France, where you are living?

JB : Because of some difficulty in arranging for the American publication, it appeared first there in a French version. They take it as an examination of a social crisis with racial implications, but a social crisis. The most honest of the critics are not afraid to compare it to the situation of the Algerian and African in Paris. In a way, it’s not too much to say that some of them take it as a kind of warning. There is a great upsurge on the right in France, and a great many people are disturbed by that. So the book does not translate to them as a provincial, parochial American problem.

DCE : Were you conscious of the international implications of the case while you were writing?

JB : I was thinking about it on one level, but for me to write the book was simply like putting blinders on a horse. On either side was the trap of rage or the trap of sorrow. I had never run into this problem in writing a book before.

I was doing a long interview in Lausanne, and it suddenly happened that I could see one of those wide intervals. I was asked a question, and with no warning at all, the face, body, and voice of one of the parents suddenly came back to me. I was suddenly back in that room, hearing that voice and seeing that face, and I had to stop the interview for a few minutes. Then I understood something.

DCE : What seem to be the European perceptions of contemporary American black writers in general?

JB : A kind of uneasy bewilderment. Until very lately, Europe never felt menaced by black people because they didn’t see them. Now they are beginning to see them and are very uneasy. You have to realize that just after the war when the American black GI arrived, he was a great, great wonder for Europe because he had nothing whatever to do with the Hollywood image of the Negro, which was the only image they had. They were confronted with something else, something unforeseeable, something they had not imagined. They didn’t quite know where he came from. He came from America, of course, but America had come from Europe. Now that is beginning to be clear, and the reaction is a profound uneasiness. So the voice being heard from black writers also attacks the European notion of their identity. If I’m not what you thought I was, who are you?

DCE : Now that your collected nonfiction has appeared in The Price of the Ticket , what reflections about your career as an essayist do you have as you look back over these pieces?

JB : It actually was not my idea to do that book, but there was no point in refusing it either. But there was also something frightening about it. It’s almost forty years, after all. On one level, it marks a definitive end to my youth and the beginning of something else. No writer can judge his work. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to judge mine. You just have to trust it. I’ve not been able to read the book, but I remember some of the moments when I wrote this or that. So in some ways, it’s a kind of melancholy inventory, not so much about myself as a writer (I’m not melancholy about that), but I think that what I found hard to decipher is to what extent or in what way my ostensible subject has changed. Nothing in the book could be written that way today.

My career began when I was twenty-one or twenty-two in The New Leader . That was a very important time in my life. I had never intended to become an essayist. But it came about because of Saul Levitas, who assigned me all these books to review. I will never know quite why he did that. I had to write a book review a week, and it was very good for me. You can always find turning points looking back, but there was one very long review of Raintree Country , a novel about an America I had never seen. Between the time that I turned in the review and its publication, the author, Ross Lockridge, committed suicide. It was very shocking because it was such a sunlit, optimistic book that had won every prize in sight. But he had blown his brains out. That marked me in a way. I didn’t feel guilty about it since he hadn’t read my review, but it struck me with great force. It was from that point, in hindsight, that I began to be considered an essayist by other people.

Later, at Commentary I had a marvelous relationship with one of the editors—Robert Warshow, my first real editor. He asked me to do an essay about the Harlem ghetto. When I turned it in, Robert said, “Do it over.” He didn’t say anything more. So I did. And then he said, “You know more than that.” I began to be aware of what he was doing. When he saw me come close to what I was afraid of, he circled it and said, “Tell me more about that.” What I was afraid of was the relationship between Negroes and Jews in Harlem—afraid on many levels. I’d never consciously thought about it before, but then it began to hit me on a profound and private level because many of my friends were Jews, although they had nothing to do with the Jewish landlords and pawnbrokers in the ghetto. So I had been blotting it out. It was with Robert that I began to be able to talk about it, and that was a kind of liberation for me. I’m in his debt forever because after that I was clear in my own mind. I suddenly realized that perhaps I had been afraid to talk about it because I was a closet anti-Semite myself. One always has that terror. And then I realized that I wasn’t. So something else was opened.

DCE : What major artistic problems have you had to confront in your nonfiction?

JB : I was a black kid and was expected to write from that perspective. Yet I had to realize the black perspective was dictated by the white imagination. Since I wouldn’t write from the perspective, essentially, of the victim, I had to find what my own perspective was and then use it. I couldn’t talk about “them” and “us.” So I had to use “we” and let the reader figure out who “we” is. That was the only possible choice of pronoun. It had to be “we.” And we had to figure out who “we” was, or who “we” is. That was very liberating for me.

I was going through a whole lot of shit in New York because I was black, because I was always in the wrong neighborhood, because I was small. It was dangerous, and I was in a difficult position because I couldn’t find a place to live. I was always being thrown out, fighting landlords. My best friend committed suicide when I was twenty-two, and I could see that I was with him on that road. I knew exactly what happened to him—everything that happened to me. The great battle was not to interiorize the world’s condemnation, not to see yourself as the world saw you, and also not to depend on your skill. I was very skillful—much more skillful than my friend, much more ruthless, too. In my own mind, I had my family to save. I could not go under; I could not afford to. Yet I knew that I was going under. And at the very same moment, I was writing myself up to a wall. I knew I couldn’t continue. It was too confining. I wrote my first two short stories, and then I split.

DCE : You said earlier that you never intended to become an essayist. Did you ever consider one or the other of the genres in which you worked as being more important than another?

JB : No, as a matter of fact I didn’t. I thought of myself as a writer. I didn’t want to get trapped in any particular form. I wanted to try them all. That’s why I say I remember having written myself into a wall. Significantly enough, the first thing I wrote when I got to Paris and got myself more or less together was the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—a summation of all these years I was reviewing those “be kind to niggers” and “be kind to Jews” books. There was a mountain of them, and every one came across my desk. I had to get out of that, and “Everybody’s Protest Novel” was my declaration of independence. Then I began to finish my first novel and did Giovanni’s Room , which was another declaration of independence. And then I was in some sense, if not free, clear.

DCE : A striking feature of your work is the great amount of autobiographical material that finds its way into essays which are not primarily autobiographical.

JB : Well, I had to use myself as an example.

DCE : When did you realize that you should use yourself in this way?

JB : It was not so much that I realized I should. It was that I realized I couldn’t avoid it. I was the only witness I had. I had the idea that most people found me a hostile black boy; I was not that. I had to find a way to make them know it, and the only way was to use myself.

—New Orleans Review, 1986

__________________________________

From Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance . Used with permission of Bloomsbury. Copyright  ©  2019 by Mark Yakich and John Biguenet.

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• Bibliography

A Comprehensive Catalog of Works by James Baldwin

• 🏛️  Archive.org, a nonprofit digital library
• 📖  Publisher website (for purchase) 
• 🔊 (audio)
• 📺 (video)

Novels 

Short stories.

• The Death of the Prophet (originally published in  Commentary , March 1950, and reprinted in  The Cross of Redemption  (edited by Randall Kenan, Pantheon Books, 2010)  🔗
• The Rockpile (original to  Going to Meet the Man )
• The Outing (originally published in New Story , April 1951)
• The Man Child ( reprinted in Playboy , January 1966 )
• Previous Condition (originally published in Commentary , October 1948)
• Sonny’s Blues (originally published in Partisan Review , Summer 1957)
• This Morning, This Evening, So Soon (originally published in The Atlantic Monthly , September 1960)
• Come Out the Wilderness (originally published in Mademoiselle , March 1958)
• Going to Meet the Man (originally published in Status , October 1965)

Nonfiction, Essays and Speeches 

• Autobiographical Notes (original to Notes of a Native Son )
• Everybody’s Protest Novel (originally published in Zero , Spring 1949, and reprinted in Partisan Review , June 1949)
• Many Thousands Gone (originally published as “The Negro: Man and Mask” in Partisan Review , November–December 1951)
• Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough (originally published as “Life Straight in De Eye” in Commentary , January 1955)
• The Harlem Ghetto (originally published in Commentary , February 1948)
• Journey to Atlanta (originally published in The New Leader , October 1948)
• Notes of a Native Son (originally published as “Me and My House …” in Harper’s , November 1955)
• Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown (originally published as “The Negro in Paris” in The Reporter , June 1950)
• A Question of Identity (originally published in Partisan Review , July–August 1954)
• Equal in Paris (originally published in Commentary , March 1955)
• Stranger in the Village (originally published in Harper’s , October 1953)
• The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American (originally published in The New York Times Book Review , January 1959)
• Princes and Powers (originally published in Encounter , January 1957)
• Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem (originally published in Esquire , July 1960)
• East River, Downtown: Postscript to a Letter from Harlem (originally published as “A Negro Assays the Negro Mood” in The New York Times Magazine , March 1961, and reprinted as “They Will Wait No More” in Negro Digest , July 1961 )
• A Fly in Buttermilk (originally published as “The Hard Kind of Courage” in Harper’s , October 1958)
• Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South (originally published in Partisan Review , Winter 1959)
• Faulkner and Desegregation (originally published in Partisan Review , Fall 1956)
• In Search of a Majority (adapted from an address at Kalamazoo College, February 1960)
• Notes for a Hypothetical Novel (adapted from an address at San Francisco State College, October 1960)  🔊
• The Male Prison (originally published as “Gide as Husband and Homosexual” in The New Leader , December 1954)
• The Northern Protestant (originally published as “The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman” in Esquire , April 1960)
• I: Eight Men (originally published as “The Survival of Richard Wright” in The Reporter , March 1961)
• II: The Exile (originally published in French as “Richard Wright, tel que je l’ai connu” in Preuves , February 1961; originally published in English as “Richard Wright” in Encounter , April 1961)
• III: Alas, Poor Richard (original to Nobody Knows My Name )
• The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy (originally published in Esquire , May 1961)
• My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew (originally published in The Progressive , December 1962)
• Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind (originally published in The New Yorker , November 1962)
• Introduction: The Price of the Ticket (original to The Price of the Ticket )
• Lockridge: “The American Myth” (originally published in The New Leader , April 1948)
• The Crusade of Indignation (originally published in The Nation , July 1956)
• On Catfish Row (originally published in Commentary , September 1959)
• They Can’t Turn Back (originally published in Mademoiselle , August 1960)
• The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King (originally published in Harper’s , February 1961, and reprinted as “ The Highroad to Destiny” in Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile , edited by C. Eric Lincoln, Hill and Wang, 1970)
• The New Lost Generation (originally published in Esquire , July 1961)
• The Creative Process (originally published in Creative America , Ridge Press, 1962)
• Color (originally published in Esquire , December 1962)
• A Talk to Teachers (adapted from an address, titled “The Negro Child—His Self-Image,” in New York City, October 1963; originally published in The Saturday Review , December 1963)
• Words of a Native Son (originally published in Playboy , December 1964)
• The American Dream and the American Negro (adapted from an address, during a debate with William F. Buckley Jr., at Cambridge University, February 1965; originally published in The New York Times Magazine , March 1965)  📺
• White Man’s Guilt (originally published in Ebony , August 1965, and expanded and reprinted as “ Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes ”   in The White Problem in America , Johnson Publishing Company, 1966)
• A Report from Occupied Territory (originally published in The Nation , July 1966)
• Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White (originally published in The New York Times Magazine , April 1967)
• White Racism or World Community? (adapted from an address at the fourth international assembly of the World Council of Churches in Uppsala, Sweden, July 1968; originally published in The Ecumenical Review , October 1968, and reprinted in Religious Education , September–October 1969)
• Sweet Lorraine (originally published in Esquire , November 1969)
• A Review of Roots (originally published as “How One Black Man Came To Be an American” in The New York Times Book Review , September 1976)
• An Open Letter to Mr. Carter (originally published in The New York Times , January 1977)
• Every Good-bye Ain’t Gone (originally published in New York Magazine , December 1977)
• If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? (originally published in The New York Times , July 1979)
• An Open Letter to the Born Again (originally published in The Nation , September 1979)
• Dark Days (originally published in Esquire , October 1980)
• Notes on the House of Bondage (originally published in The Nation , November 1980)
• Here Be Dragons (originally published as “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood” in Playboy , January 1985)
• Smaller Than Life (originally published in The Nation , July 1947)
• History as Nightmare (originally published in The New Leader , October 1947)
• The Image of the Negro (originally published in Commentary , April 1948)
• Preservation of Innocence (originally published in Zero , Summer 1949)
• The Negro at Home and Abroad (originally published in The Reporter , November 1951)
• Sermons and Blues (originally published in The New York Times Book Review , March 1959)
• “This Nettle, Danger …” (originally published in Show , February 1964, and reprinted in part as “ Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare ”  in  The Observer , April 1964)
• On the Painter Beauford Delaney (originally published as the introduction to an exhibition of paintings by Beauford Delaney at Galerie Lambert in Paris, December 1964, and reprinted in Transition , No. 18, 1965)
• Last of the Great Masters (originally published in The New York Times Book Review , October 1977)
• Introduction to Notes of a Native Son, 1984 (originally published in the 1984 edition of Notes of a Native Son  by Beacon Press)
• Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes (adapted from an address at a symposium by the Tamiment Institute, June 1959; originally published in Culture for the Millions? , edited by Norman Jacobs, D. Van Nostrand Company, 1959, and reprinted in  Daedalus , Spring 1960)
• A Word from Writer Directly to Reader (originally published in Fiction of the Fifties , edited by Herbert Gold, Doubleday, 1959)
• Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve—A Forum (adapted from an address at a symposium by the Liberation Committee for Africa, June 1961)
• Theater: The Negro In and Out (originally published as  “James Baldwin on the Negro Actor” and “Theatre” in The Urbanite , April and May, respectively, 1961, and reprinted in Negro Digest , April 1966)
• Is A Raisin in the Sun a Lemon in the Dark? (originally published in Tone , April 1961)
• As Much Truth as One Can Bear (originally published in The New York Times Book Review , January 1962)
• Geraldine Page: Bird of Light (originally published in Show , February 1962)
• What’s the Reason Why?: A Symposium by Best-Selling Authors: James Baldwin on Another Country (originally published in The New York Times Book Review , December 1962)
• The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity (adapted from an address at the Community Church in New York, November 1962; broadcast by WBAI; originally published in Liberation , March 1963 ; and produced in LP form as “The Struggle” by Buddah Records, 1969 )  🔊
• We Can Change the Country (originally published in Liberation , October 1963)
• The Uses of the Blues (adapted from an address at Monterey Peninsula College, April 1962; originally published in Playboy , January 1964)
• What Price Freedom? (adapted from an address in Washington, D.C., November 1963; originally published in Freedomways , Spring 1964)
• The White Problem (adapted from an address, titled “ Free and Brave,”   at Second Baptist Church in Los Angeles, May 1963; originally published in Frontier , June 1963)  🔊
• Black Power (originally published as “In Defense of Stokely Carmichael” in The Guardian , February 1968; reprinted as “Why A Stokely?” in The St. Petersburg Times , March 1968; reprinted as “ A Letter to Americans” in Freedomways , Spring 1968; and reprinted as “From Dreams of Love to Dreams of Terror” in Natural Enemies? Youth and the Clash of Generations , edited by Alexander Klein, Lippincott, 1969)
• The Price May Be Too High (originally published as “Can Black and White Artists Still Work Together? The Price May Be Too High” in The New York Times , February 1969)
• The Nigger We Invent (adapted from a statement at a hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on Labor, held in New York City, March 1968; originally published in Integrated Education , March–April 1969)
• Speech from the Soledad Rally (adapted from an address at Central Hall, Westminster, April 1971; originally published in Speeches from the Soledad Brothers Rally , Notting Hill Press, Ltd., 1975)
• A Challenge to Bicentennial Candidates (originally published in The Los Angeles Times , February 1976)
• The News from All the Northern Cities Is, to Understate It, Grim; the State of the Union is Catastrophic (originally published in The New York Times , April 1978)
• Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit (originally published in Freedomways , Special Issue, Fourth Quarter 1979)
• On Language, Race, and the Black Writer ( adapted from an address at UC Berkeley, January 1979,  originally published in The Los Angeles Times , April 1979)  📺
• Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption (originally published in New Edinburgh Review , Autumn 1979)
• Black English: A Dishonest Argument (adapted from an address at Wayne State University, February 1980)
• This Far and No Further (originally published in Time Capsule , Summer–Fall 1983)
• On Being White … and Other Lies (originally published in Essence , April 1984)
• Blacks and Jews (adapted from an address followed by a Q&A at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, February 1984; originally published in The Black Scholar , November–December 1988)
• To Crush a Serpent (originally published as “To Crush the Serpent” in Playboy , January 1987)
• The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston (originally published in Nugget , February 1963, and reprinted in Antaeus , Spring 1989)
• Sidney Poitier (originally published in Look , July 1968)
• Letters from a Journey (originally published in Harper’s , May 1963)
• The International War Crimes Tribunal (originally published as “The War Crimes Tribunal” in Freedomways , Summer 1967)
• Anti-Semitism and Black Power (originally published in Freedomways , Winter 1967)
• An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis (originally published as “Dear Sister …” in The Guardian , December 1970, and reprinted in The New York Review of Books , January 1971)
• A Letter to Prisoners (originally published in Inside/Out , Summer 1982)
• The Fire This Time: Letter to the Bishop (originally published as “Letter to Bishop Tutu” in The New Statesman , August 1985, and reprinted as “Whites’ Freedom Depends on Blacks’” in The Los Angeles Times , January 1986)
• [Afterword to] A Quarter Century of Un-Americana (originally published as “Envoi” in A Quarter Century of Un-Americana , edited by Charlotte Pomerantz, Marzani & Munsell, 1963)
• [Foreword to] Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odysse y (originally published as “The Poet in Exile” in Olé , No. 5, 1966, and reprinted as “Preface” in Memoirs of a Bastard Angel , by Harold Norse, William & Morrow, 1989)
• [Foreword to] The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, 1626-1940 (originally published as “Preface” in The Negro in New York , edited by Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby, Oceana Publications, 1967)
• [Foreword to] Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether (originally published as “Foreword” in Daddy Was a Number Runner , by Louise Meriwether, Prentice Hall, 1970)
• [Foreword to] A Lonely Rage by Bobby Seale (originally published as “Stagolee” in A Lonely Rage , by Bobby Seale, Times Books, 1978)
• [Review of] Best Short Stories by Maxim Gorky (originally published as “Maxim Gorky as Artist” in The Nation , April 1947)
• [Review of] Mother by Maxim Gorky (originally published as “Battle Hymn” in The New Leader , November 1947)
• [Review of] The Amboy Dukes by Irving Shulman (originally published as “When the War Hit Brownsville” in The New Leader , May 1947)
• [Review of] The Sure Hand of God by Erskine Caldwell (originally published as “The Dead Hand of Caldwell” in The New Leader , December 1947)
• [Review of] The Sling and the Arrow by Stuart Engstrand (originally published as “Without Grisly Gaiety” in The New Leader , September 1947)
• [Review of] Novels and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson … (originally published as “Bright World Darkened” in The New Leader , January 1948)
• [Review of] Flood Crest by Hodding Carter (originally published as “Change within a Channel” in The New Leader , April 1948)
• [Review of] The Moth by James M. Cain (originally published as “Modern Rover Boys” in The New Leader , August 1948)
• [Review of] The Portable Russian Reader , edited by Bernard Gilbert Guerney (originally published as “Literary Grab-Bag” in The New Leader , February 1948)
• [Review of] The Person and the Common Good by Jacques Maritain (originally published as “Present and Future” in The New Leader , March 1948)
• [Review of] The Negro Newspaper by Vishnu V. Oak … (originally published as “Too Late, Too Late” in Commentary , January 1949)
• [Review of] The Cool World by Warren Miller (originally published as “War Lord of the Crocadiles” in The New York Times Book Review , June 1959)
• [Review of] Essays by Seymour Krim (originally published as a review of Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer in The Village Voice , July 1961)
• [Review of] The Arrangement by Elia Kazan (originally published as “God’s Country” in The New York Review of Books , March 1967)
• [Review of] A Man’s Life: An Autobiography by Roger Wilkins (originally published as “Roger Wilkins: A Black Man’s Odyssey in White America” in The Washington Post Book World , June 1982)
• Among the Recent Letters to the Editor: Freedom and the South (published in The New York Times Book Review , February 1961)
• Foreword to Freedom Ride , by Jim Peck, Simon and Schuster, 1962
• Not 100 Years of Freedom  (published in Liberator , January 1963)
• Political Murder in Birmingham (published in New America , September, 1963)
• The Creative Dilemma  (published in The Saturday Review , February 1964)
• On the Harlem Riots (published in The New York Post , August 1964, and reprinted as “Fear of the Police” in Pageant , December 1964)
• In Search of a Basis for Mutual Understanding and Racial Harmony  (published in The Nature of a Humane Society: A Symposium on the Bicentennial of the United States of America , edited by H. Ober Hess, Fortress Press, 1967)
• A Question of Commitment (published in The New York Times Book Review , June 1968)
• Introduction to The Chasm , by Robert Campbell, Houghton Mifflin, 1974
• Introduction to Cazac: Peintures d'Italie, 67-77 , by Olivier de Magny, 1977
• Introduction  to  We Are Everywhere , by Michael Raeburn, Random House, 1978
• The Language of the Streets  (published in Literature and the Urban Experience , edited by Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts, Rutgers University Press, 1981)
• Belatedly, the Fear Turned to Love for His Father (published in TV Guide, January 1985)
• Introduction to Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts: Essays in Struggle , by Michael Thelwell, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987
• A House Is Not a Home  (published in Architectural Digest , August 1987)
• “I feel reconciled to myself and my past …”  (published in Perspectives: Angles on African Art , The Center for African Art, 1987)
• 100 Years of Freedom (a speech at UC Berkeley, May 1963; broadcast by KPFA) [ audio via Archive.org ]
• The Moral Responsibility of the Artist (a speech followed by a Q&A at the University of Chicago, May 1963) [ audio via YouTube ]
• Living and Growing in a White World (a speech followed by a Q&A at Castlemont High School in Oakland, Calif., June 1963; broadcast by KQED) [ audio via Archive.org ]
• After the Murder of Four Children (a speech at the New York Community Church, September 1963; broadcast by WBAI, October 1963) [ audio via American Archive of Public Broadcasting ]
• My Childhood: James Baldwin’s Harlem (narration of a short film produced by Benchmark Films, 1964) [ video via YouTube ]
• A Benefit Appearance (a speech before the Non-Violent Action Committee in Los Angeles, December 1964) [ audio via Archive.org , starts at 45:50]
• Public Broadcast Laboratory, Ep. 116: Literary Review (a speech broadcast on NET, March 1968) [ video via American Archive of Public Broadcasting , 1:31:47–1:36:12]
• Men and Women in the Arts Concerned with Vietnam:  Introducing Martin Luther King  (a speech at Marlon Brando’s Beverly Hills home, March 1968; broadcast by KPFK) [ audio via Archive.org , 00:23–06:10]
• James Baldwin: From Another Place (narration of a short film by Sedat Pakay, shot in Istanbul in May 1973, produced in 1973) [ video via MUBI ]
• Writers Speak (a speech followed by a Q&A at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, November 1983; broadcast by WFCR) [ audio via Credo ; partial video via YouTube ]
• The World I Never Made (a speech followed by a Q&A at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., December 1986) [ audio via Library of Congress ; video via C-SPAN ]​ ​

Dialogues, Debates and Discussions

• An Interview with James Baldwin, Studs Terkel (originally broadcast by WFMT, December 1961, though taped in July; and produced in LP form as “Black Man in America” by Credo, 1962) 🔊
• The Image: Three Views—Ben Shahn, Darius Milhaud and James Baldwin Debate the Real Meaning of a Fashionable Term, Malcolm Preston (adapted from a symposium at Hofstra College, May 1961; originally published in Opera News , December 1962)
• ‘It’s Terrifying,’ James Baldwin: The Price of Fame, Nat Hentoff (originally published in The New York Herald Tribune , June 1963)
• A Conversation with James Baldwin, Kenneth B. Clark (originally broadcast on WGBH, June 1963, though taped in May; published in Freedomways , Summer 1963, and reprinted as  “There is No Compromise” in Negro Digest , October 1963) 📺
• Race, Hate, Sex, and Colour: A Conversation with James Baldwin and Colin Maclnnes, James Mossman (originally broadcast on BBC; published in Encounter , July 1965)
• James Baldwin Breaks His Silence, Cep Dergisi (originally published in English in  Atlas , March 1967)
• Disturber of the Peace: James Baldwin—An Interview, Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch (originally published in Mademoiselle , May 1963, and reprinted in Black, White and Gray , edited by Bradford Daniel, Sheed and Ward, 1964)
• Conversation: Ida Lewis and James Baldwin (originally published in Essence , October 1970, and  reprinted as “Why I Left America ”   in  New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Afro-American Literature , edited by Abraham Chapman, New American Library, 1972 )
• Are We on the Edge of Civil War?, David Frost (originally broadcast on “The David Frost Show,” April 1970; published in The Americans , by David Frost, Stein & Day, 1970)
• James Baldwin Interviewed, John Hall (originally published in  Transatlantic Review , Autumn–Winter 1970-71, and reprinted in  Transition , No. 41, 1972 )
• It’s Hard to be James Baldwin, Herbert R. Lottman (originally published in Intellectual Digest , July 1972, and reprinted in Black Times , December 1972)
• A Television Conversation: James Baldwin, Peregrine Worsthorne, Bryan Magee (originally published as “Arguing on the Box” in Encounter , September 1972)
• Exclusive Interview with James Baldwin, Joe Walker (originally published in Muhammad Speaks , September–October 1972)
• The Black Scholar Interviews James Baldwin (originally published in The Black Scholar , December 1973–January 1974)
• James Baldwin Comes Home, Jewell Handy Gresham (originally published in Essence , June 1976)
• The Artist Has Always Been a Disturber of the Peace, Yvonne Neverson (originally published in Africa: An International Business, Economic and Political Monthly , April 1978)
• James Baldwin: No Gain for Race Relations, Hollie I. West (originally published as “James Baldwin: The Fire Still Burns” in The Washington Post , April 1979)
• James Baldwin: Looking Towards the Eighties, Kalamu ya Salaam (originally published in The Black Collegian , December 1979–January 1980)
• James Baldwin Finds New South Is a Myth, Leonard Ray Teel (originally published in The Atlanta Journal , April 1980)
• James Baldwin, an Interview, Wolfgang Binder (originally published in Revista/Review Interamericana , Fall 1980)
• In Dialogue to Define Aesthetics: James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe, Dorothy Randall-Tsuruta (originally published in The Black Scholar , March–April 1981)
• James Baldwin—Reflections of a Maverick, Julius Lester (originally published in The New York Times Book Review , May 1984)
• The Art of Fiction LXXVIII: James Baldwin, Jordan Elgrably and George Plimpton (originally published in The Paris Review , Spring 1984)
• Blues for Mr. Baldwin, Angela Cobbina (originally published in Concord Weekly , January 1985)
• An Interview with Josephine Baker and James Baldwin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (originally published in The Southern Review , Summer 1985)
• An Interview with James Baldwin, David C. Estes (originally published in New Orleans Review , Fall 1986)
• Last Testament: An Interview with James Baldwin, Quincy Troupe (originally published in The Village Voice , January 1988)
• James Baldwin, 1924-1987: A Tribute—The Last Interview, Quincy Troupe (originally published in Essence , March 1988)
• The Negro in American Culture (broadcast on WBAI, January 1961; published in CrossCurrents , Summer 1961; reprinted in The New Negro , edited by Mathew H. Ahmann, Fides Publishers, Inc., 1961, and reprinted in Negro Digest , March 1962)  🔊
• The Black Muslims in America , with Malcolm X, C. Eric Lincoln, James Baldwin and George S. Schuyler, hosted by Eric F. Goldman (broadcast on “The Open Mind,” April 1961; published in Rac(e)ing to the Right: selected essays of George S. Schuyler , edited by Jeffrey B. Leak, University of Tennessee Press, 2001)  🔊
• Native Son , W. J. Weatherby (published in The Guardian , November 1962)
• The Negro Writer in America (adapted from a symposium at Howard University; published in The Howard University Magazine , and reprinted in Negro Digest , June 1963)
• Freedom Day, 1963: A Lost Interview with James Baldwin , Fern Marja Eckman (1963 interview published in  The New Yorker , September 2020)
• James Baldwin, as interviewed by François Bondy (published in French as “Pour libérer les Blancs … ”  in Preuves , October 1963;  published in English in  Transition , January–February 1964)
• Liberalism and the Negro: A Round-Table Discussion (published in Commentary , March 1964)
• Playwright at Work , Walter Wager (published in Playbill , July 1964)
• James Baldwin Gets ‘Older and Sadder,’ Nat Hentoff (published in The New York Times , April 1965)
• What Kind of Men Cry? : Baldwin, Belafonte, Poitier Are Among Men Who Give Their Views On Subject (published in Ebony , June 1965)
• Leadership from the Periphery , Robert Penn Warren  (recorded in April 1964; published in Who Speaks for the Negro? , Random House, 1965)  🔊
• James Baldwin  … in Conversation , Dan Georgakas (published in Arts in Society , Summer 1966, and reprinted as “ James Baldwin talking” in Crucible , Summer 1969)
• Dialog in Black and White , James Baldwin and Budd Schulberg (published in Playboy , December 1966)
• A Free Press Interview with James Baldwin , Hakim Jamal (published in Los Angeles Free Press , February 1968, and reprinted as “ They Came to See if I'm for Real” in James Baldwin Review , September 2022 )
• James Baldwin Speaks His Mind , Hakim Jamal (published in Los Angeles Sentinel , April 1968)
• How can we get the black people to cool it? (published in Esquire , July 1968)
• Writer Foresees Collision Course , Nick Ludington (published in The Washington Post , December 1969)
• “I’m Trying to be as Honest as I Can:” An Interview with James Baldwin , Nazar Büyüm (1969 interview published in English in  James Baldwin Review , September 2015)
• Interview with James Baldwin , Karen Wald (published in  Liberation News Service , February 1970; reprinted in many small independent newspapers and magazines, such as Pandora’s Box , February 1970, and Come Out! , June–July 1970, and reprinted under alternate titles such as “James Baldwin on the Black Panthers” in Blue-Tail Fly , February 1970, and “We’re All Viet Cong” in HARRY , March 1970)
• James Baldwin: Une Interview Exclusive , Nabile Farès (published in Jeune Afrique , September 1970; reprinted in  Un Passager de l'Occident , by Nabile  Farès, 1971; published in English in A Passenger from the West , translated by Peter Thompson, 2010, and reprinted in Transition , No. 105, 2011)
• L’Express va plus loin avec James Baldwin (published in French in  L’Express , August 1972; clipped and translated by the FBI)
• “I live a hope despite my knowing better”: James Baldwin in Conversation with Fritz J. Raddatz  (1978 interview published in English in  James Baldwin Review , September 2018)
• James Baldwin talks to Brandon Judell (published in New York Native , January 1981)
• ‘Go the Way Your Blood Beats’: An Interview with James Baldwin , Richard Goldstein (published in Th e Village Voice , June 1984)
• My Interview With James Baldwin  (published in Hampshire Reports , Winter 1984)
• Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (published in Essence , December 1984)
• An Interview with James Baldwin on Henry James , David Adams Leeming (published in The Henry James Review , Fall 1986)
• James Baldwin on Langston Hughes , Clayton Riley (1986 interview published in The Langston Hughes Review , Winter 1997)
• Encounter: On Being Black in America (with Nathan Cohen, broadcast on CBC, December 1960) [ video via CBC Digital Archives ]
• Black Muslims vs the Sit-ins (a debate with Malcolm X, moderated by Leverne McCummins, broadcast by WBAI, April 1961) [ audio via KPFA ]
• Bookstand: Writers and Writing: Wonder and Terror (with Peter Duval Smith, broadcast on BBC, April 1963) [ video via YouTube ]
• A Conversation with James Baldwin (with Elsa Knight Thompson and John Leonard, broadcast by KPFA, June 1963 though taped in May) [ audio via American Archive of Public Broadcasting ]
• Florida Forum (broadcast on WCKT, June 1963) [ video via YouTube ]
• Hollywood Roundtable (a short film by USIA with Harry Belafonte, Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, Joseph Mankiewicz and Marlon Brando, moderated by David Schoenbrun, August 1963) [ video via National Archives ]
• The Meaning of the Birmingham Tragedy (with Reinhold Niebuhr and Dr. Thomas C. Kilgore Jr., broadcast on “Our Protestant Heritage,” September 1963) [ video via Presbyterian Historical Society ]
• Take This Hammer (a documentary film produced by KQED, 1964) [ video via Bay Area Television Archive ]
• Yale Report: Writers on Writing (R.W.B. Lewis, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and William Styron discuss modern fiction writing, broadcast by WBAI, September 1967) [ audio via Pacifica Radio Archives ]
• Baldwin and R.H. Darden (introduced by comedian Dick Van Dyke, broadcast by KPFK, April 1968) [ audio via Archive.org ]
• The Confessions of Nat Turner (with William Styron and Ossie Davis, broadcast by KPFA, August 1968 though taped in May) [ audio via Pacifica Radio Archives ]
• Our People (with Jim Tilman, broadcast on WTTW, August 1968) [ video via YouTube , 25:00–46:00]
• The Way It Is: On Race In America (with Moses Znaimer, broadcast on CBC, November 1968) [ video via YouTube ]
• James Baldwin at City College San Francisco (news report featuring an interview by Ed Arnow, broadcast by KPIX, April 1969) [ video via Bay Area Television Archive ]
• The Dick Cavett Show (part 2 with Paul Weiss; broadcast on ABC, May 1969) [videos — Part 1 and Part 2 — via YouTube]
• Baldwin's Nigger (with Dick Gregory, a documentary film by Horace Ové, 1969) [ video currently unavailable ]
• Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (a documentary film by Terence Dixon, 1970) [ video via MUBI ]
• Martin Luther King Speaks: Dear Angela (with Joe Walker and George Cain, broadcast by KPFA, June 1971) [ audio via American Archive of Public Broadcasting ]
• Conversation with a Native Son (with Toni Morrison, broadcast on WNET, May 1975) [ video via American Archive of Public Broadcasting ]
• Pantechnicon: Discussing The Devil Finds Work (broadcast by WGBH, April 1976) [ audio via American Archive of Public Broadcasting , starts at 13:00]
• Looting During New York Blackout (with Rep. Herman Badillo and Syl Williamson, broadcast on “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” July 1977) [ video via American Archive of Public Broadcasting , starts at 15:06]
• Never Aired: Profile on James Baldwin (produced for ABC’s 20/20, 1979) [ video via A Closer Look ]
• Interview with Visiting Faculty Member James Baldwin (with Larry Schwab, broadcast on “Five College Journal,” May 1984) [ video via Hampshire College Archives and Special Collections ]
• Folks (broadcast on Louisiana Public Broadcasting, February 1986) [ video via Louisiana Public Broadcasting , 1:40–12:46]
• Mavis on Four (with Mavis Nicholson, broadcast on Channel Four, February 1987) [ video via Thames Television Archive ]

10 James Baldwin Books to Read in Your Lifetime

More from the literary legend behind If Beale Street Could Talk.

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James Baldwin is an iconic author for our time, a writer who gave the world countless poignant essays, shorts stories, novels , plays, and poems during his 63 years. As a gay Black man coming to terms with his identity in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, Baldwin—who died on December 1, 1987—used his distinct perspective and lyrical writing to shed light on issues of race, homosexuality, and religion in a way that placed him ahead of his time when it came to social commentary.

From Go Tell It on the Mountain to Giovanni's Room and If Beale Street Could Talk , which was adapted for the big screen in 2019, we've gathered some of Baldwin's most popular texts, all of which are still essential reading today. And don't worry: we've included a complete list of his life's work, too—because they're all worthy of praise.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

In his first novel, Baldwin penned a semi-autobiographical story about a boy named John Grimes, a teen growing up in 1930s Harlem who struggles with self-identity as the stepson of a strict Pentecostal minister. The story mirrors the author's own life; Baldwin too was raised by a stepfather who served as a Baptist pastor. " Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else,'' he told T he New York Times in 1985. ''I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father."

Notes of a Native Son

In this collection of essays, the writer captured the complexities of being Black in America during the first rumblings of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. Throughout his observations, Baldwin both lamented the injustices in the African American community and showed empathy for the oppressor, establishing himself as a key voice in the movement. In a 1958 New York Times review of Notes of a Native Son, African American poet Langston Hughes said this of Baldwin's words: "America and the world might as well have a major contemporary commentator."

Giovanni's Room

A landmark novel in American literature, Giovanni's Room follows an American man living in Paris who struggles with understanding his sexuality as he deals with the societal pressures of masculinity—all as he begins an affair with an Italian bartender named Giovanni. The book, which is widely considered essential reading in the LGBTQ community, was a finalist for the National Book Awards' fiction category in 1957.

Nobody Knows My Name

In another collection of 23 culturally reflective essays, Baldwin highlights the complexity of discriminatory tensions in our society with words that are still just as poignant and relevant today. A selection of Baldwin's new and revised works, many of the titles originally appeared in publications like Esquire and The New York Times Magazine . The essays earned him another spot as a finalist in the National Book Awards in 1962—this time in the nonfiction category.

Another Country

Set in New York City's Greenwich Village in the 1950s, Another Country explores themes of mental health, interracial relationships, love, and bisexuality as the story follows the lives of a group of friends in the wake of a suicide.

After its release, many critics had mixed responses, with Paul Goodman for the New York Times writing that while the story was "personal, sinuous yet definite" it was also "strained [and] sometimes journalistic or noisy." He did, however, acknowledge that his harsher review was a result of Baldwin's previous work, which caused a higher standard of criticism.

The Fire Next Time

Comprised of two essays that were originally published in The New Yorker —"My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation" and "Down At The Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind"—in The Fire Next Time , Baldwin explains the place of both race and racism in society, while also examining and criticizing Christianity's role in American beliefs. At the time, critics saw this collection as a way for white Americans to (finally) get a look inside what life was like as a Black citizen in this country.

Going to Meet the Man: Stories

A collection of eight short stories, this book delves into yet another set of cultural themes through its varied characters: a struggling jazz musician, an angry father, and a racist cop to name a few. Popular titles included are Sonny's Blues; This Morning, This Evening, So Soon; and The Man Child.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

In this Baldwin novel, a fictional noted actor Leo Proudhammer nearly dies after suffering from a heart attack on stage. Throughout the rest of the novel, he reflects on the events of his life—both those that led him to fame and those that revealed his weaknesses.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Now a Golden Globe-nominated film directed by Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk follows young couple Fonny and Tish as they deal with the trial and jailing of Fonny, who is falsely accused of rape. In the big-screen version, the title characters are played by up-and-comers Stephan James and Kiki Layne. When speaking to The Atlantic about what led him to take the story to the big screen, Jenkins said, "Baldwin had a few voices that he wrote in, and one of those voices was just deeply sensual, innately in touch with human emotions... I think this book is the perfect fusion of the more essayistic protest novel and somebody who deeply believed in sensuality and love."

I Am Not Your Negro

In the years before his death, Baldwin envisioned a book about his friends Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers—but never finished it. By combining an unpublished manuscript called Remember This House and varied excerpts from Baldwin's book, notes, interviews, and letters, Raul Peck edited and published the story that the literary great never got to see come to life. Peck also directed the 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary of the same name.

A Complete List of James Baldwin Works

Essays A Talk to Teachers Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son No Name in the Street Notes o f a Native Son The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings The Devil Finds Work The Evidence of Things Not Found The Price of the Ticket

Novels Another Country Giovanni's Room Go Tell It on the Mountain If Beale Street Could Talk Just Above My Head Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Plays Blues for Mister Charlie The Amen Corner Poems Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems Short Stories Come Out the Wilderness Going to Meet the Man Previous Condition Sonny's Blues This Morning, This Evening, So Soon The Man Child The Outing The Rockpile

McKenzie Jean-Philippe is the editorial assistant at OprahMag.com covering pop culture, TV, movies, celebrity, and lifestyle. She loves a great Oprah viral moment and all things Netflix—but come summertime, Big Brother has her heart. On a day off you'll find her curled up with a new juicy romance novel.

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The 19 best James Baldwin books, ranked by Goodreads reviewers

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• James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an American writer and activist.
• He wrote critical essays and classic works of fiction that illuminate racism in America.
• We used Goodreads to determine the 19 most popular James Baldwin books.

James Baldwin was an American writer and activist known for his passions about race, sexuality, and class in America. A key voice in the Civil Rights and gay liberation movements, Baldwin's work reveals criticisms of racism that prevailed in nearly all facets of society, from relationships to politics to cinema. No matter the medium, his work is regarded as honest, insightful, and passionate. 

We used Goodreads rankings to determine the most popular James Baldwin books. With over 125 million members, Goodreads members can rate and review their favorite works . Whether you're looking to read Baldwin's searing essay collections and powerful novels or explore his insightful plays and poetry, here are some of his best works. 

Learn more about how Insider Reviews tests and researches books.

The 19 best James Baldwin books, according to Goodreads members:

19. "nothing personal".

Available on Amazon and Bookshop  

"Nothing Personal" is a Baldwin essay collection about American society during the Civil Rights movement, published in 1964. In his writing, Baldwin questions society's racial fixations, recounts a disturbing police encounter, and ponders upon race in America — highlighting issues that share stark similarities to the current Black Lives Matter movement.

18. "Little Man, Little Man"

Available on Amazon and Bookshop

This children's picture book is about a four-year-old boy named TJ who grows up in Harlem and becomes a "little man" as he discovers the realities of the adult world. With a foreward from Baldwin's nephew, TJ, this childrens' book celebrates Black childhood while also highlighting the challenging realities that sometimes accompany it.

17. "The Amen Corner"

Highlighting the importance of religion and the effects of poverty on one African American family, "The Amen Corner" is a play about Margaret Alexander, a church pastor in Harlem, whose dying husband returns after a long absence. As the truth of their pasts come to light, Margaret risks losing her congregation and her family.

16. "Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems"

This is the most prominent collection of James Baldwin's poetry, from his earliest writing to the words written just before his passing. Enlightened and honest, Baldwin's lyrical and dramatic poetry is just as profound as his fiction and essays.

15. "The Devil Finds Work"

"The Devil Finds Work" is a critical essay collection on racism in cinema, from the movies Baldwin saw as a child to the underlying racist messages in the most popular films of the 1970s. Intertwining personal history with cinematic interpretations, these essays are a crucial commentary and analysis of subliminal messaging, racial disconnect, and racial weaponization in film.

14. "Blues for Mister Charlie"

Loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, "Blues for Mister Charlie" is a play about a Black man who is murdered by a white man in a small town, launching a complex weave of consequences that reveal the lasting wounds of racism. Beloved for Baldwin's gentle writing about harsh subjects, this play stands as an indictment of racism and a demonstration of its violence. 

13. "Just Above My Head"

"Just Above My Head" was the last novel James Baldwin published before his passing in 1987. The story centers on Arthur Hall, a gospel singer, but is about a group of friends who begin preaching and singing in Harlem churches and spans 30 years as they travel, fall in love, and experience the Civil Rights movement.

12. "Dark Days"

Available on Amazon  

This essay collection features three prominent Baldwin essays where he draws upon personal experience to critique racist institutions and how they dismantle equal opportunities for education and democracy. With a firm voice that is still relevant today, Baldwin highlights the effects from all systems on what it means to be Black in America. 

11. "No Name in the Street"

Published in 1972, "No Name in the Street" is an essay collection in which Baldwin recounts historical events that shaped his childhood and understanding of race in society. From Baldwin's reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to his experience of the 1963 March on Washington, his essays are an eloquent but powerful prophetic account of history.

10. "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone"

This Baldwin novel is about an actor named Leo Proudhammer who has a heart attack while performing on stage. Switching between Leo's childhood in Harlem and his acting career, the novel traverses each of Leo's relationships while examining the effects of trauma on individuals.

9. "Nobody Knows My Name"

"Nobody Knows My Name" is James Baldwin's second essay collection, a classic compilation of writings on race in America and autobiographical accounts of Baldwin's experiences. This collection was a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Awards in 1962, admired for Baldwin's "unflinching honesty."  

8. "I Am Not Your Negro"

Available on Amazon and  Bookshop

"I Am Not Your Negro" is a posthumous collection of James Baldwin's notes, essays, and letters edited by Raoul Peck that were first used to create the 2016 documentary of the same name. Based on an unfinished manuscript from James Baldwin about the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., this book is a powerful project to celebrate Baldwin's work.

7. "Going to Meet the Man"

This book is a short story collection featuring men and women who struggle through the lasting effects of racism in their lives. A demonstration of Baldwin's mastery of prose, these stories are passionate as the characters use art, religion, and sexuality to celebrate life and find peace through suffering.

6. "Notes of a Native Son"

"Notes of a Native Son" is James Baldwin's first essay collection, a revered classic featuring 10 essays on the topic of race in America and Europe. From critiques of popular books and movies to examinations of race in Harlem, this collection is loved for Baldwin's astute and eloquent insights into the world and how his experiences fit into a larger picture.

5. "Another Country"

Controversial at the time of publication for depictions of bisexuality and interracial couples, this 1962 classic centers on Rufus Scott, a Black man living in 1950s Greenwich Village. When Rufus meets a white woman and falls in love, society openly condemns their relationship, which deeply affects both of them.

4. "If Beale Street Could Talk"

This classic follows Tish, a 19-year-old woman, who is in love with a young sculptor named Fonny. When Fonny is wrongly accused of a crime and sent to prison, both of their families set out on an emotional journey to prove his innocence. 

3. "Go Tell It on the Mountain"

Available on Amazon and  Bookshop  

"Go Tell It on the Mountain" is James Baldwin's first publication, a semi-autobiographical novel about John, a teenager in 1930s Harlem. With themes of self-identity and realization, holiness, and mortality, this book is about John's self-invention and understanding his identity in the context of his family and community.

2. "Giovanni's Room"

With over 80,000 ratings on Goodreads, "Giovanni's Room" is the most-rated James Baldwin book amongst Goodreads members. Baldwin's second novel is considered a gay literature classic, the story of an American man in Paris who is caught between morality and desire when he meets an alluring man named Giovanni.

1. "The Fire Next Time"

Both a call to action and a searing attack on racism, "The Fire Next Time" is an essay collection featuring two letters — one to Americans and the other two his nephew — as a call to end racism 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. These letters are more direct than his fictional writing, making it a compelling classic of thoughtful and persistent reflections, and the most popular James Baldwin book on Goodreads.

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Exploring the Life and Works of James Baldwin

Discover the profound impact that author James Baldwin had on American literature, society, and readers worldwide.

In the rich tapestry of American literature, few voices are as resounding and complex as that of James Baldwin. Revered for his eloquent prose and unflinching explorations of race, sexuality, and humanity, Baldwin’s legacy continues to enchant and challenge readers today.

Like Toni Morrison , I first started reading James Baldwin in my early twenties as he wasn’t an author who was taught at the schools I attended.  I’ve reread his works many times since, and I have to tell you, I’m always taking away something new. In this article, I will do a mini-deep dive into the life and works of James Baldwin while also celebrating his profound impact on the literary world and society at large.

About James Baldwin’s Life

A literary luminary.

James Baldwin stands as a literary luminary, an author, and an activist whose work continues to be a foundational pillar for understanding the soul of America. His contributions are as much personal as they are universal, expressing the vast human experience with the specificity of his own complex identity. Baldwin’s ability to intertwine the personal and the political, the spiritual and the societal, is what makes his body of work not just relevant but imperative in the modern world.

Early Life and Influences

Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem, New York, an environment that profoundly shaped his worldview. His stepfather’s strict Pentecostal beliefs and his mother’s commitment to education sowed the seeds of religious and literary pursuits in the young Baldwin. Yet, it was his encounters with systemic racism and burgeoning realizations about his sexuality that became the lenses through which he observed his surroundings.

His early literary influences were also a testament to his eclectic taste. From the classics to contemporary writers, Baldwin devoured literature with a thirst for knowledge that is reflected in the depth of his later works. His voracious consumption of varied texts provided him with a rich understanding of history and philosophy, which he used to deconstruct and reconstruct sociopolitical ideologies.

About James Baldwin’s Works

Literary career: a revolution in written word.

Baldwin’s literary career was launched with “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” a semi-autobiographical novel that delved into the role of the church in the Black community and an individual’s search for identity. His unique use of language and narrative structure announced to the literary world a voice that would not be quelled.

“Another Country” and “The Fire Next Time” cemented his status as an intellectual and voice of his generation. The latter, a pair of essays that elegantly argued for racial justice, both admonished and inspired a divided nation. His themes of love, power, and the complexities of human nature were not merely intellectual exercises but profound interrogations of the American psyche.

Social and Political Activism: The Intersection of Art and Protest

To understand James Baldwin is to recognize a man committed to his art and the fight for civil rights. His experiences living in France, which allowed him to articulate the Black American condition from an outsider’s perspective, added layers to his analysis of race and identity. Baldwin’s work became increasingly political, and he found himself in the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, not only as a writer but as an outspoken activist. His involvement in the movement provided a conduit to dismantle ingrained racism and to advocate for the rights and representation of the Black community.

Frequently Asked Questions about James Baldwin

What topics did james baldwin write about.

James Baldwin’s literary works traversed a wide range of topics, most notably delving into themes of racial and social injustice, sexual orientation, and human morality. His powerful narratives and essays examined the complexities of identity and the pervasive impact of systemic racism on both individual lives and society at large. Baldwin’s writing also candidly addressed the intersections of race, class, and sexuality, often drawing from his personal experiences as a black, gay man in mid-20th-century America. His efforts to articulate the black experience and challenge the status quo transcended literary art, positioning him as a pivotal voice in national debates on civil rights and social reform.

What was James Baldwin’s style of writing?

James Baldwin’s style of writing was characterized by its eloquent yet unyielding prose, a style that facilitated deep explorations into complex themes and human emotions. Poetic yet powerful, Baldwin’s voice straddled the realms of incisive social critique and intimate narrative storytelling. His sentences often carried a rhythmic quality that mirrored the cadences of a preacher—a nod to his early religious influences—which he used to both soothe and disturb his readers’ consciousness. Baldwin’s ability to examine and articulate profound truths about the human condition made his work not just moving but existential and indispensable in its call for moral and social reckoning.

What is James Baldwin’s most famous work?

Baldwin’s most acclaimed piece is undoubtedly “The Fire Next Time,” published in 1963. This powerful book is composed of two essays: “My Dungeon Shook — Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,” and “Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind.” These essays critically address the complexities of race relations in America and articulate Baldwin’s perspectives on the intersection of race, history, and religion. “The Fire Next Time” is hailed not only for its profound insights but also for its influence on the civil rights movement and its contribution to the ongoing dialogue about race in the United States.

What was James Baldwin’s most famous poem?

While James Baldwin is principally renowned for his essays, novels, and plays, he didn’t produce a body of work that can be categorized within poetry in the traditional sense. However, his prose often carried a poetic quality, rich in rhythm and vivid imagery, resonating deeply with his readers. Though none of his works are explicitly labeled as poems, his book “Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems,” published posthumously, does offer a collection of Baldwin’s poetic writings that further highlight the lyrical nature of his prose. The poem “Staggerlee Wonders,” found within this collection, stands out, with its powerful reflection on black identity and history. This piece, while not as widely cited as his essays or novels, demonstrates Baldwin’s ability to weave poetically charged language into his examination of race and social issues.

What are James Baldwin’s famous quotes?

James Baldwin is celebrated for a multitude of profound and thought-provoking quotes that capture his insights on life, love, and the human struggle for justice. One of his most famous quotes is: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” This encapsulates Baldwin’s belief in the importance of confronting difficult truths. Another notable quote is: “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” Baldwin’s contemplations on love highlight its complexity and the evolution it necessitates in us. Additionally, his powerful statement, “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose,” speaks to the potential for unrest and rebellion when individuals are pushed to the margins of society. These quotes and many others continue to inspire and challenge individuals around the world.

For more James Baldwin quotes, check out: 30 James Baldwin Quotes That Still Resonate Today

Was James Baldwin religious?

Despite James Baldwin’s early engagement with religion, his relationship with faith was complex and evolved significantly over his lifetime. As a teenager, he was a preacher at a small Pentecostal church in Harlem, New York, an experience that left an indelible mark on his writing style and thematic choices. However, Baldwin grew to become a critic of organized religion, viewing it as a mechanism that could both oppress and liberate. While he utilized religious metaphors and themes in his work, he did so with a critical perspective, exploring the intersections of religion, race, and sexuality. Baldwin’s spiritual journey was one from a fervent childhood believer to a nuanced observer of religion’s influence on identity and morality, and this journey deeply informed his literary creations.

How did James Baldwin change the world?

James Baldwin’s impact on the world is immeasurable, as he not only altered the landscape of American literature but also influenced the global dialogue on race, sexuality, and human rights. Through his poignant essays, plays, and novels, Baldwin challenged societal norms and offered a raw, unfiltered examination of the American identity. His writings, which gave voice to the disenfranchised, played a crucial role in the Civil Rights Movement, pressing America to confront its legacy of racism and discrimination. Baldwin’s works also provided a lexicon for understanding and articulating the intersectionality of identity, laying the groundwork for future discussions on race, gender, and sexual orientation. By using his personal struggles and observations as a springboard for broader conversations, Baldwin forged a world more introspective, more aware of its faults, and more courageous in facing them, setting the stage for subsequent generations of activists and writers to continue the fight for equality and justice.

What did James Baldwin pass away from?

James Baldwin passed away from stomach cancer on December 1, 1987, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. He was 63 years old. Baldwin’s illness had been an ongoing battle, and he succumbed to it while at his home in the south of France. His life and legacy, however, continue to resonate, as his writings remain as poignant and influential as ever in contemporary discussions on race and equality.

About James Baldwin’s Legacy & Impact

Legacy and influence: beyond the page.

The legacy of James Baldwin is a living testament to the power of the written word. His influence extends far beyond the academic and literary circles, informing the work of activists and artists who continue to be inspired by his courage and conviction. His texts are now part of the curriculum, guiding future generations to engage critically with American society.

Contemporary authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jesmyn Ward carry the torch that Baldwin lit, keeping his vision of a just and equitable society alive. In an age marked by social unrest and calls for change, Baldwin’s work remains as poignant as ever, offering both a salve and a challenge to heal the wounds of the past.

The Enduring Impact of Baldwin’s Words

No exploration could capture the full essence of James Baldwin; his legacy is one that grows and morphs in the hands and minds of those who engage with his thoughts. His life’s work exemplifies the power of storytelling as a catalyst for change and a beacon of hope. As the world navigates through its ongoing struggles toward social equity, James Baldwin’s voice continues to resonate, reminding us that literature isn’t just an artifact of the past – it’s a powerful tool for reshaping our present and our future. As we reflect on the life and works of James Baldwin, we invite you to immerse yourself in the pages that transformed lives and inspired movements. So whether you are a seasoned reader of Baldwin or are just beginning your journey, his words will undoubtedly leave an indelible mark, challenging you to think deeper and act with greater empathy and understanding.

Are you interested in reading James Baldwin’s books?

Three of James Baldwin’s most famous works are “Go Tell It On The Mountain” ( Amazon or Bookshop, ) an autobiographical narrative telling of James’ own experiences being raised by a deeply religious family; “The Fire Next Time” ( Amazon or Bookshop ,) a combination of two essays that explore race relations in America; and “Notes of a Native Son” ( Amazon or Bookshop ,) an exploration of what it means to be Black in the United States.  But, no matter which James Baldwin work you choose, you’re sure to be enveloped within his passionate prose and captivating storytelling as if you were there with them in person.

Have you read any books by James Baldwin?

What is your favorite James Baldwin book?  Are any of his works on your TBR?  How much of his literary or personal life did you know about?  Let’s talk about all things Baldwin in the comments below!

MORE READING:

• 5 Must-Read James Baldwin Books + Where To Start
• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin: A Literary Masterpiece
• Unearthing the Depths of Familial Bonds in If Beale Street Could Talk
• 30 James Baldwin Quotes That Still Resonate Today

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The Essential James Baldwin

He wrote with the kind of clarity that was as comforting as it was chastising. Here’s where to start.

Credit... Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet, via Getty Images

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By Robert Jones Jr.

Robert Jones Jr. is the author of the novel “The Prophets.”

• Feb. 28, 2024

James Baldwin would have turned 100 on Aug. 2 this year. His final works were published almost 40 years ago, just two years before his death in 1987 . Yet his writing is as imperative as ever. He wrote with the kind of moral vision that was as comforting as it was chastising — almost surely the influence of the pulpit he once occupied as a child preacher in his native Harlem.

Baldwin never went to college, but he read, by his own count, every book in the library . Remarkably, he never received any of the major literary awards. But he wrote with grace and aplomb across genre: essay, novel, short story, song, children’s literature, drama, poetry and, infamously, screenplay. I say infamously because he was hired to write the script for a Malcolm X biopic, which he did reluctantly. Hollywood made it into a documentary instead and then never released it , leaving Baldwin to publish it himself in book form, as “ One Day When I Was Lost .”

Few people are as eloquent with the pen as Baldwin was. He returned again and again to central themes: compassion, radical honesty, and his insistence that we “ grow up .” Even after leaving the United States for France in the 1940s, hoping to escape the pervasive anti-Blackness he had experienced and witnessed, he was a fierce observer of race and culture in America. There is as much spiritual intensity as academic rigor in his books, along with a sense that he was trying to capture something as large as life with his words. That wrestling manifested itself in the length of some of his sentences ( one totals 321 words ). He sacrificed nothing — not style, not substance, not clarity, not beauty, not wisdom — except brevity.

All of his writing — no matter how pointed, critical or angry — is imbued with love. As someone who understood that love is key to liberation, he committed himself to the herculean task of persuading the rest of us. In the documentary short “ Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris ,” he says: “Love has never been a popular movement and no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together — really it is held together — by the love and the passion of a very few people.”

But alongside his deep affection for humanity was the abiding despair that attends when someone has decided to be a particular kind of witness, that is to say a prophet, which Baldwin certainly was — not because he could foretell the future, but because as an enormously astute observer of human behavior, he could make connections that escaped everyone else. As he said so sublimely in his 1972 memoir, “ No Name in the Street ”: “Every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”

Baldwin’s sexuality and the role it played in his writing are too often overlooked or minimized. Existing at this intersection of identities blessed him with empathy and nuanced insight. He described it simply: “I loved a few women, I loved a few men. That was what saved my life.” But he never truly identified as bisexual, homosexual, gay or queer because he thought it was bizarre to distinguish those realities from more socially acceptable ones.

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Poems & Poets

James Baldwin

A novelist and essayist of considerable renown, James Baldwin bore witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife. Baldwin’s writing career began in the last years of legislated segregation; his fame as a social observer grew in tandem with the civil rights movement as he mirrored Black people’s aspirations, disappointments, and coping strategies in a hostile society. Tri-Quarterly contributor Robert A. Bone declared that Baldwin’s publications “have had a stunning impact on our cultural life” because the author “... succeeded in transposing the entire discussion of American race relations to the interior plane; it is a major breakthrough for the American imagination.” In his novels, plays, and essays alike, Baldwin explored the psychological implications of racism for both the oppressed and the oppressor. Best-sellers such as Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time acquainted wide audiences with his highly personal observations and his sense of urgency in the face of rising Black bitterness. As Juan Williams noted in the Washington Post, long before Baldwin’s death, his writings “became a standard of literary realism. ... Given the messy nature of racial hatred, of the half-truths, blasphemies and lies that make up American life, Baldwin’s accuracy in reproducing that world stands as a remarkable achievement. ... Black people reading Baldwin knew he wrote the truth. White people reading Baldwin sensed his truth about the lives of black people and the sins of a racist nation.”   Critics accorded Baldwin high praise for both his style and his themes. “Baldwin has carved a literary niche through his exploration of ‘the mystery of the human being’ in his art,” observed Louis H. Pratt in James Baldwin. “His short stories, novels, and plays shed the light of reality upon the darkness of our illusions, while the essays bring a boldness, courage, and cool logic to bear on the most crucial questions of humanity with which this country has yet to be faced.” In the College Language Association Journal, Therman B. O’Daniel called Baldwin “the gifted professor of that primary element, genuine talent. ... Secondly he is a very intelligent and deeply perceptive observer of our multifarious contemporary society. ... In the third place, Baldwin is a bold and courageous writer who is not afraid to search into the dark corners of our social consciences, and to force out into public view many of the hidden, sordid skeletons of our society. ... Then, of course, there is Baldwin’s literary style which is a fourth major reason for his success as a writer. His prose ... possesses a crystal clearness and a passionately poetic rhythm that makes it most appealing.” Saturday Review correspondent Benjamin De Mott concluded that Baldwin “retains a place in an extremely select group: That composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers. He owes his rank partly to the qualities of responsiveness that have marked his work from the beginning. ... Time and time over in fiction as in reportage, Baldwin tears himself free of his rhetorical fastenings and stands forth on the page utterly absorbed in the reality of the person before him, strung with his nerves, riveted to his feelings, breathing his breath.”   Baldwin’s central preoccupation as a writer lay in “his insistence on removing, layer by layer, the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country,” according to Orde Coombs in the New York Times Book Review. The author saw himself as a “disturber of the peace”—one who revealed uncomfortable truths to a society mired in complacency. Pratt found Baldwin “engaged in a perpetual battle to overrule our objections and continue his probe into the very depths of our past. His constant concern is the catastrophic failure of the American Dream and the devastating inability of the American people to deal with that calamity.” Pratt uncovered a further assumption in Baldwin’s work; namely, that all of mankind is united by virtue of common humanity. “Consequently,” Pratt stated, “the ultimate purpose of the writer, from Baldwin’s perspective, is to discover that sphere of commonality where, although differences exist, those dissimilarities are stripped of their power to block communication and stifle human intercourse.” The major impediment in this search for commonality, according to Baldwin, is white society’s entrenched moral cowardice, a condition that through longstanding tradition equates Blackness with dark impulses, carnality and chaos. By denying Black people's essential humanity so simplistically, the author argued, whites inflict psychic damage on blacks and suffer self-estrangement—a “fatal bewilderment,” to quote Bone. Baldwin’s essays exposed the dangerous implications of this destructive way of thinking; his fictional characters occasionally achieve interracial harmony after having made the bold leap of understanding he advocated. In the British Journal of Sociology, Beau Fly Jones claimed that Baldwin was one of the first Black writers “to discuss with such insight the psychological handicaps that most Negroes must face; and to realize the complexities of Negro-white relations in so many different contexts. In redefining what has been called the Negro problem as white, he has forced the majority race to look at the damage it has done, and its own role in that destruction.”   Essayist John W. Roberts felt that Baldwin’s “evolution as a writer of the first order constitutes a narrative as dramatic and compelling as his best story.” Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem under very trying circumstances. His stepfather, an evangelical preacher, struggled to support a large family and demanded the most rigorous religious behavior from his nine children. Roberts wrote: “Baldwin’s ambivalent relationship with his stepfather served as a constant source of tension during his formative years and informs some of his best mature writings. ... The demands of caring for younger siblings and his stepfather’s religious convictions in large part shielded the boy from the harsh realities of Harlem street life during the 1930s.” As a youth Baldwin read constantly and even tried writing; he was an excellent student who sought escape from his environment through literature, movies, and theatre. During the summer of his 14th birthday he underwent a dramatic religious conversion, partly in response to his nascent sexuality and partly as a further buffer against the ever-present temptations of drugs and crime. He served as a junior minister for three years at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, but gradually he lost his desire to preach as he began to question Black people's acceptance of Christian tenets that had, in essence, been used to enslave them.   Shortly after he graduated from high school in 1942, Baldwin was compelled to find work in order to help support his brothers and sisters; mental instability had incapacitated his stepfather. Baldwin took a job in the defense industry in Belle Meade, New Jersey, and there, not for the first time, he was confronted with racism, discrimination, and the debilitating regulations of segregation. The experiences in New Jersey were closely followed by his stepfather’s death, after which Baldwin determined to make writing his sole profession. He moved to Greenwich Village and began to write a novel, supporting himself by performing a variety of odd jobs. In 1944 he met author Richard Wright, who helped him to land the 1945 Eugene F. Saxton fellowship. Despite the financial freedom the fellowship provided, Baldwin was unable to complete his novel that year. He found the social tenor of the United States increasingly stifling even though such prestigious periodicals as the Nation, New Leader, and Commentary began to accept his essays and short stories for publication. Eventually, in 1948, he moved to Paris, using funds from a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship to pay his passage. Most critics feel that this journey abroad was fundamental to Baldwin’s development as an author.   “Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean,” Baldwin told the New York Times, “I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that. I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both.” Through some difficult financial and emotional periods, Baldwin undertook a process of self-realization that included both an acceptance of his heritage and an admittance of his bisexuality. Bone noted that Europe gave the young author many things: “It gave him a world perspective from which to approach the question of his own identity. It gave him a tender love affair which would dominate the pages of his later fiction. But above all, Europe gave him back himself. The immediate fruit of self-recovery was a great creative outburst. First came two [works] of reconciliation with his racial heritage. Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Amen Corner represent a search for roots, a surrender to tradition, an acceptance of the Negro past. Then came a series of essays which probe, deeper than anyone has dared, the psychic history of this nation. They are a moving record of a man’s struggle to define the forces that have shaped him, in order that he may accept himself.”   Many critics view Baldwin’s essays as his most significant contribution to American literature. Works such as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen “serve to illuminate the condition of the black man in twentieth-century America,” according to Pratt. Highly personal and analytical, the essays probe deeper than the mere provincial problems of white versus black to uncover the essential issues of self-determination, identity, and reality. “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian,” Baldwin told Life magazine. “His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.” South Atlantic Quarterly contributor Fred L. Standley asserted that this quest for personal identity “is indispensable in Baldwin’s opinion and the failure to experience such is indicative of a fatal weakness in human life.” C.W.E. Bigsby elaborated in The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama: “Baldwin’s central theme is the need to accept reality as a necessary foundation for individual identity and thus a logical prerequisite for the kind of saving love in which he places his whole faith. For some this reality is one’s racial or sexual nature, for others it is the ineluctable fact of death. ... Baldwin sees this simple progression as an urgent formula not only for the redemption of individual men but for the survival of mankind. In this at least black and white are as one and the Negro’s much-vaunted search for identity can be seen as part and parcel of the American’s long-standing need for self-definition.”   Inevitably, however, Baldwin’s assessments of the “sweet” and “bitter” experiences in his own life led him to describe “the exact place where private chaos and social outrage meet,” according to Alfred Kazin in Contemporaries. Eugenia Collier described this confrontation in Black World: “On all levels personal and political ... life is a wild chaos of paradox, hidden meanings, and dilemmas. This chaos arises from man’s inability—or reluctance to face the truth about his own nature. As a result of this self-imposed blindness, men erect an elaborate facade of myth, tradition, and ritual behind which crouch, invisible, their true selves. It is this blindness on the part of Euro-Americans which has created and perpetuated the vicious racism which threatens to destroy this nation.” In his essays on the 1950s and early 1960s, Baldwin sought to explain Black experiences to a white readership as he warned whites about the potential destruction their psychic blindness might wreak. Massachusetts Review contributor David Levin noted that the author came to represent “for ‘white’ Americans, the eloquent, indignant prophet of an oppressed people, a voice speaking ... in an all but desperate, final effort to bring us out of what he calls our innocence before it is (if it is not already) too late. This voice calls us to our immediate duty for the sake of our own humanity as well as our own safety. It demands that we stop regarding the Negro as an abstraction, an invisible man; that we begin to recognize each Negro in his ‘full weight and complexity’ as a human being; that we face the horrible reality of our past and present treatment of Negroes—a reality we do not know and do not want to know.” In Ebony magazine, Allan Morrison observed that Baldwin evinced an awareness “that the audience for most of his nonfictional writings is white and he uses every forum at his disposal to drive home the basic truths of Negro-white relations in America as he sees them. His function here is to interpret whites to themselves and at the same time voice the Negro’s protest against his role in a Jim Crow society.”   Because Baldwin sought to inform and confront whites, and because his fiction contains interracial love affairs—both homosexual and heterosexual—he came under attack from the writers of the Black Arts Movement, who called for a literature exclusively by and for Blacks. Baldwin refused to align himself with the movement; he continued to call himself an “American writer” as opposed to a “Black writer” and continued to confront the issues facing a multi-racial society. Eldridge Cleaver, in his book Soul on Ice, accused Baldwin of a hatred of Blacks and “a shameful, fanatical fawning” love of whites. What Cleaver saw as complicity with whites, Baldwin saw rather as an attempt to alter the real daily environment with which American Blacks have been faced all their lives. Pratt noted, however, that Baldwin’s efforts to “shake up” his white readers put him “at odds with current white literary trends” as well as with the Black Arts Movement. Pratt explained that Baldwin labored under the belief “that mainstream art is directed toward a complacent and apathetic audience, and it is designed to confirm and reinforce that sense of well-being. ... Baldwin’s writings are, by their very nature, iconoclastic. While Black Arts focuses on a Black-oriented artistry, Baldwin is concerned with the destruction of the fantasies and delusions of a contented audience which is determined to avoid reality.” As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Baldwin escalated his attacks on white complacency from the speaking platform as well as from the pages of books and magazines. Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time both sold more than a million copies; both were cited for their predictions of Black violence in desperate response to white oppression. In Encounter, Colin MacInnes concluded that the reason “why Baldwin speaks to us of another race is that he still believes us worthy of a warning: he has not yet despaired of making us feel the dilemma we all chat about so glibly, ... and of trying to save us from the agonies that we too will suffer if the Negro people are driven beyond the ultimate point of desperation.”   Retrospective analyses of Baldwin’s essays highlight the characteristic prose style that gives his works literary merit beyond the mere dissemination of ideas. In A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics, Irving Howe placed the author among “the two or three greatest essayists this country has ever produced.” Howe claimed that Baldwin “has brought a new luster to the essay as an art form, a form with possibilities for discursive reflection and concrete drama. ... The style of these essays is a remarkable instance of the way in which a grave and sustained eloquence—the rhythm of oratory, ... held firm and hard—can be employed in an age deeply suspicious of rhetorical prowess.” “Baldwin has shown more concern for the painful exactness of prose style than any other modern American writer,” noted David Littlejohn in Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes. “He picks up words with heavy care, then sets them, one by one, with a cool and loving precision that one can feel in the reading. ... The exhilarating exhaustion of reading his best essays—which in itself may be a proof of their honesty and value—demands that the reader measure up, and forces him to learn.”   Baldwin’s fiction expanded his exploration of the “full weight and complexity” of the individual in a society prone to callousness and categorization. His loosely autobiographical works probed the milieus with which he was most familiar—Black evangelical churches, jazz clubs, stifling Southern towns, and the Harlem ghetto. In The Black American Writer: Fiction, Brian Lee maintained that Baldwin’s “essays explore the ambiguities and ironies of a life lived on two levels—that of the Negro and that of the man—and they have spoken eloquently to and for a whole generation. But Baldwin’s feelings about the condition— alternating moods of sadness and bitterness—are best expressed in the paradoxes confronting the haunted heroes of his novels and stories. The possible modes of existence for anyone seeking refuge from a society which refuses to acknowledge one’s humanity are necessarily limited, and Baldwin has explored with some thoroughness the various emotional and spiritual alternatives available to his retreating protagonists.” Pratt felt that Baldwin’s fictive artistry “not only documents the dilemma of the Black man in American society, but it also bears witness to the struggle of the artist against the overwhelming forces of oppression. Almost invariably, his protagonists are artists. ... Each character is engaged in the pursuit of artistic fulfillment which, for Baldwin, becomes symbolic of the quest for identity.”   Love, both sexual and spiritual, was an essential component of Baldwin’s characters’ quests for self-realization. John W. Aldridge observed in the Saturday Review that sexual love “emerges in his novels as a kind of universal anodyne for the disease of racial separatism, as a means not only of achieving personal identity but also of transcending false categories of color and gender.” Homosexual encounters emerged as the principal means to achieve important revelations; as Bigsby explained, Baldwin felt that “it is the homosexual, virtually alone, who can offer a selfless and genuine love because he alone has a real sense of himself, having accepted his own nature.” Baldwin did not see love as a “saving grace,” however; his vision, given the circumstances of the lives he encountered, was more cynical than optimistic. In his introduction to James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, Kenneth Kinnamon wrote: “If the search for love has its origin in the desire of a child for emotional security, its arena is an adult world which involves it in struggle and pain. Stasis must yield to motion, innocence to experience, security to risk. This is the lesson that ... saves Baldwin’s central fictional theme from sentimentality. ... Similarly, love as an agent of racial reconciliation and national survival is not for Baldwin a vague yearning for an innocuous brotherhood, but an agonized confrontation with reality, leading to the struggle to transform it. It is a quest for truth through a recognition of the primacy of suffering and injustice in the American past.” Pratt also concluded that in Baldwin’s novels, “love is often extended, frequently denied, seldom fulfilled. As reflections of our contemporary American society, the novels stand as forthright indictments of the intolerable conditions that we have accepted unquestioningly as a way of life.”   Black family life—the charged emotional atmosphere between parents and children, brothers and sisters—provided another major theme in Baldwin’s fiction. This was especially apparent in his first and best-known novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, the story of a Harlem teenager’s struggles with a repressive father and with religious conversion. According to Roberts, Go Tell It on the Mountain “proved that James Baldwin had become a writer of enormous power and skill. [It] was an essential book for Baldwin. Although clearly a fictional work, it chronicles two of the most problematic aspects of his existence as a young man: a son’s relationship to his stepfather and the impact of fundamentalist religion on the consciousness of a young boy.” In her work entitled James Baldwin, Carolyn Wedin Sylvander praised Baldwin’s family chronicle particularly because the author “is dealing comprehensively and emotionally with the hot issue of race relations in the United States at a time ... when neither white ignorance and prejudice nor black powerlessness is conducive to holistic depictions of black experience.” Indeed, the overt confrontation between the races that characterizes Baldwin’s later work was here portrayed as a peripheral threat, a danger greater than, but less immediate than, the potential damage inflicted by parents on children. Sylvander wrote: “It is painfully, dramatically, structurally clear throughout Go Tell It on the Mountain that the struggles every individual faces—with sexuality, with guilt, with pain, with love—are passed on, generation to generation.” Littlejohn described Baldwin’s treatment of this essential American theme as “autobiography-as-exorcism, ... a lyrical, painful, ritual exercise whose necessity and intensity the reader feels.” Pratt likewise stated that Go Tell It on the Mountain “stands as an honest, intensive, self-analysis, functioning simultaneously to illuminate self, society, and mankind as a whole.”   In addition to his numerous books, Baldwin was one of the few Black authors to have had more than one of his plays produced on Broadway. Both The Amen Corner, another treatment of storefront pentecostal religion, and Blues for Mister Charlie, a drama based on the racially-motivated murder of Emmett Till in 1955, had successful Broadway runs and numerous revivals. Standley commented in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that in both plays, “as in his other literary works, Baldwin explores a variety of thematic concerns: the historical significance and the potential explosiveness in black-white relations; the necessity for developing a sexual and psychological consciousness and identity; the intertwining of love and power in the universal scheme of existence as well as in the structures of society; the misplaced priorities in the value systems in America; and the responsibility of the artist to promote the evolution of the individual and the society.” In The Black American Writer: Poetry and Drama, Walter Meserve offered remarks on Baldwin’s abilities as a playwright. “Baldwin tries to use the theatre as a pulpit for his ideas,” Meserve stated. “Mainly his plays are thesis plays—talky, over-written, and cliche dialogue and some stereotypes, preachy, and argumentative. Essentially, Baldwin is not particularly dramatic, but he can be extremely eloquent, compelling, and sometimes irritating as a playwright committed to his approach to life.” Meserve added, however, that although the author was criticized for creating stereotypes, “his major characters are the most successful and memorable aspects of his plays. People are important to Baldwin, and their problems, generally embedded in their agonizing souls, stimulate him to write. ... A humanitarian, sensitive to the needs and struggles of man, he writes of inner turmoil, spiritual disruption, the consequence upon people of the burdens of the world, both White and Black.”   Baldwin’s oratorical prowess—honed in the pulpit as a youth—brought him into great demand as a speaker during the civil rights era. Sylvander observed that national attention “began to turn toward him as a spokesperson for Blacks, not as much because of his novels as his essays, debates, interviews, panel discussions.” Baldwin embraced his role as racial spokesman reluctantly and grew increasingly disillusioned as the American public “disarmed him with celebrity, [fell] in love with his eccentricities, and institutionalized his outrage ... into prime- time entertainment,” to quote Aldridge. Nor was Baldwin able to feel that his speeches and essays were producing social change—the assassinations of three of his associates, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, shattered his remaining hopes for racial reconciliation. Kinnamon remarked that by 1972, the year Baldwin published No Name in the Street, “the redemptive possibilities of love seemed exhausted in that terrible decade of assassination, riot, and repression. ... Social love had now become for Baldwin more a rueful memory than an alternative to disaster.” London Magazine contributor James Campbell also noted that by 1972 “Baldwin the saviour had turned into Baldwin the soldier. What [observers] failed to notice was that he was still the preacher and the prophet, that his passion and rage were mingled with detachment, and that his gloomy prognostications were based on powerful observation and an understanding of the past which compelled their pessimism.”   Many critics took Baldwin to task for the stridency and gloom that overtook his writings. “To function as a voice of outrage month after month for a decade and more strains heart and mind, and rhetoric as well,” declared Benjamin De Mott in the Saturday Review. “The consequence is a writing style ever on the edge of being winded by too many summonses to intensity.” New Republic correspondent Nathan Glazer likewise stated that Baldwin had become “an accusing voice, but the accusation is so broad, so general, so all-embracing, that the rhetoric disappears into the wind.” Stephen Donadio offered a similar opinion in the Partisan Review: “As his notoriety increased, his personality was oversimplified, appropriated, and consumed. ... Mr. Baldwin created a situation in which the eye of the audience was fixed on the author as a performer, and the urgency of the race problem in America became a backdrop for elaborate rhetorical assaults which could be dutifully acknowledged but forgotten with a sigh.”   Baldwin’s passionate detractors were offset by equally passionate defenders, however. Sylvander wrote: “Wading through vehement and sometimes shallow reactions to the deep water of the statements and works themselves, one is struck repeatedly by the power of Baldwin’s prose, and by our continuing need, as readers and as citizens, for his steadying apocalyptic vision. Finally, in his fantastic, experientially various, wide-ranging, searching, and committed life, one can find a vigorous model for venturing beyond charted areas.” Charles Newman made two points in James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. First, Newman noted that Baldwin’s experience is “unique among our artists in that his artistic achievements mesh so precisely with his historical circumstances. He is that nostalgic type—an artist speaking for a genuinely visible revolution.” Second, Newman maintained that as an observer of this painful revolution, “almost alone [Baldwin] continued to confront the unmanageable questions of modern society, rather than creating a nuclear family in which semantic fantasies may be enacted with no reference to the larger world except that it stinks.” Kinnamon concluded: “James Baldwin has always been concerned with the most personal and intimate areas of experience and also with the broadest questions of national and global destiny—and with the intricate interrelationships between the two. Whatever the final assessment of his literary achievement, it is clear that his voice—simultaneously that of victim, witness, and prophet—has been among the most urgent of our time.”   At the time of his death from cancer late in 1987, Baldwin was still working on two projects—a play, The Welcome Table, and a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Although he lived primarily in France, he had never relinquished his United States citizenship and preferred to think of himself as a “commuter” rather than as an expatriate. The publication of his collected essays, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948- 1985, and his subsequent death sparked reassessments of his career and comments on the quality of his lasting legacy. “Mr. Baldwin has become a kind of prophet, a man who has been able to give a public issue all its deeper moral, historical, and personal significance,” remarked Robert F. Sayre in Contemporary American Novelists. “Certainly one mark of his achievement, ... is that whatever deeper comprehension of the race issue Americans now possess has been in some way shaped by him. And this is to have shaped their comprehension of themselves as well.” Sylvander asserted that what emerges from the whole of Baldwin’s work is “a kind of absolute conviction and passion and honesty that is nothing less than courageous. ... Baldwin has shared his struggle with his readers for a purpose—to demonstrate that our suffering is our bridge to one another.”   Perhaps the most telling demonstration of the results of Baldwin’s achievement came from other Black writers. Orde Coombs, for instance, concluded: “Because he existed we felt that the racial miasma that swirled around us would not consume us, and it is not too much to say that this man saved our lives, or at least, gave us the necessary ammunition to face what we knew would continue to be a hostile and condescending world.” Playwright Amiri Baraka phrased a similar assessment even more eloquently in his funeral eulogy to Baldwin. “This man traveled the earth like its history and its biographer,” Baraka said. “He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, sang, made us think, made us better, made us consciously human. ... He made us feel ... that we could defend ourselves or define ourselves, that we were in the world not merely as animate slaves, but as terrifyingly sensitive measurers of what is good or evil, beautiful or ugly. This is the power of his spirit. This is the bond which created our love for him.” In a posthumous profile for the Washington Post, Juan Williams wrote: “The success of Baldwin’s effort as the witness is evidenced time and again by the people, black and white, gay and straight, famous and anonymous, whose humanity he unveiled in his writings. America and the literary world are far richer for his witness. The proof of a shared humanity across the divides of race, class and more is the testament that the preacher’s son, James Arthur Baldwin, has left us.”

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James Baldwin Collected Essays Library Of America ( 1998)

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