James Arthur Baldwin

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Baldwin, James (1924–1987), novelist, essayist, playwright, scriptwriter, director, poet, filmmaker, college professor, lecturer, and expatriate. Easily recognized as one of the leading African American authors, James Baldwin has contributed to a variety of genres in American literary creativity. He has especially used novels and essays to focus on his favorite themes: the failure of the promise of American democracy, questions of racial and sexual identity, the failures of the Christian church, difficult family relationships, and the political and social worlds that shaped the American “Negro” and then despised him for that shaping. Frequently employing a third person plural voice in his essays, Baldwin exhorts the exploiters and the exploited to save the country from its own destructive tendencies. An activist who put his body on the line with his politics, Baldwin was intimidatingly articulate in “telling it like it is” in interviews as well as on paper. A small man whose voice was one of the largest America had ever heard, Baldwin was intent upon pricking the consciences of all Americans in an era—particularly the 1960s—when a liberal climate was especially receptive to that pricking. Pushed slightly into the literary background with the wide publishing of works by African American women writers and the scholarly focus on their works after 1980, Baldwin published fewer book-length works but never lost sight of his ultimate objectives: to write well and to be a good man.

James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, on 2 August 1924. His mother, Emma Berdis Jones, gave birth to James while she was single. When Baldwin was a toddler, Jones married David Baldwin, an itinerant preacher from Louisiana, who would prove to be the bane of young Jimmy's existence. Not only did his stepfather assert that James was ugly and bore the mark of the devil, but he refused to recognize James's native intelligence or his sanctioning by white teachers. This painful autobiographical material would provide the substance of Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). John Grimes, the protagonist in that novel, is a precocious child applauded by white teachers and principals, but whose father cannot abide the fact that this “imposter,” this illegitimate son, is infinitely more obedient and “holy” than his legitimate son. John also wrestles with homosexual leanings, which the young Baldwin, by contrast, was able to resolve fairly early in life—he had homosexual as well as heterosexual relationships. Homosexuality would serve as the theme for Baldwin's second novel, Gio-vanni's Room (1956), in which a white American slumming in Paris becomes sexually involved with a young Italian. David, the American, contemplates his sexual identity and its negative consequences on the evening that Giovanni, convicted for killing an older man who wanted sexual favors from him, is executed for that crime.

Baldwin grew up as the caretaker for his eight younger siblings. As he cradled babies in his arms, he read avidly, borrowing initially from the two Harlem public libraries and later from the Forty-second Street New York Public Library. One of the works that would prove significant for his later critical development was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Baldwin asserts that he had read the book so many times by the fifth grade that his mother moved it to a shelf beyond his diminutive reach. Later, Baldwin would criticize the novel for its dependence upon the protest literature tradition. The young Jimmy's writing talent was also discovered early, and his teachers requested special assignments from him on several occasions. At Frederick Douglass Junior High School (P.S. 139), he edited the school newspaper, the Douglass Pilot, to which he contributed a short story and several editorials and sketches. Baldwin had the priviledge of studying with Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who not only taught but served as adviser to the literary club.

The best that can be said of Baldwin's teenage years is that they were uneasy. As he recounts in The Fire Next Time (1962), he found himself the target of the police as well as unscrupulous neighbors. Their physical and potential sexual exploitation of him led him to embrace the church at the age of fourteen when he encountered a black woman evangelist, Mother Horn, who asked “Whose little boy are you?” The question so evoked a sense of belonging in Baldwin that he simply replied, “Why, yours,” and joined her church. From that time until he was seventeen, Baldwin was a “young minister” in the Pentecostal Church. Heavy doses of Bible reading and abstinence from even simple pleasures like going to the movies led Baldwin to believe he had made a mistake. Church folks were trying to keep him out of the theater, he asserted later, when all along he had been performing in one. The implication that performance was an important (and problematic) feature of church membership would surface in several of Baldwin's works, including especially his play The Amen Corner (1955).

At De Witt Clinton High School, Baldwin published “The Woman at the Well”, “Mississippi Legend”, and “Incident in London”, all stories reflecting a religious influence, in the school newspaper, the Magpie. He also served—with Richard Avedon, with whom he would later collaborate on Nothing Personal—as editor-in-chief of the newspaper. Upon graduation in 1942, he worked briefly on the construction of a railroad depot in New Jersey, a job from which Baldwin was repeatedly fired. A couple of years later, in 1944, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he began exploring his writing potential more seriously. It was here that he began a novel he first called “Crying Holy,” then “In My Father's House,” before it would be published as Go Tell It on the Mountain. Acquaintance with Richard Wright led to Wright recommending Baldwin for a Eugene Saxton Fellowship, which he received in 1945. A book review in the Nation in 1946 officially launched Baldwin's professional career.

After repeated disastrous racial and personal encounters, Baldwin was convinced that he should leave the country for his own sanity. He bought a one-way ticket to France and sailed on 11 November 1948, shortly after he received a Rosenwald Fellowship. Before his departure, he also terminated wedding plans and threw the engagement rings into the Hudson River. That was the last occasion on which Baldwin seriously considered a heterosexual liaison. His intimate relationships would become decidedly homosexual, although his preference was for bisexuality in his partners.

France might have provided the psychological space that Baldwin needed, but it was not without its racial tensions. Baldwin was acutely aware of the plight of Algerians in France, and he was aware of how white Americans acted toward him and other black Americans on their visits abroad. In Notes of a Native Son (1955) he commented on the difficulties presented when “black” (Africans) met “brown” (African Americans) on foreign soil. Tensions were also created when he inadvertently received a bed sheet from a helpful friend who did not mention he had taken it from the hotel at which he resided. Arrested and left to stumble around a jail cell without his shoe strings or belt, Baldwin compared the systemic control of black lives in Paris with that of blacks in America. He concluded that his adopted country was no less racist than his native one. Yet Baldwin would remain in France—except for sojourns in other European locales, in Africa, and periodic returns to the United States for civil rights movement activism (1957, 1960), lecturing, and teaching engagements—until his death in 1987. During returns to the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s, Baldwin marched or conversed with civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X, and he joined Lorraine Hansberry and others in an infamous meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963.

His early years in Paris enabled Baldwin to interact with such luminaries as Richard Wright, although their relationship would be strained later. It was in part because Baldwin moved to France that black artist Beauford Delaney moved there. He held a special role as a father figure to Baldwin, but his increasing delusions and onset of insanity in later years caused Baldwin much distress before Delaney was finally institutionalized. From France, however, Baldwin continued his creative output, producing essays and plays in addition to novels. Along with Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son and Giovanni's Room made Baldwin's first decade out of the country a particularly creative period.

Baldwin also spent time in Switzerland. Indeed, he completed Go Tell It on the Mountain in the Swiss village home of Lucien Happersberger, who by 1952 had become Baldwin's primary intimate partner. Another stint out of Paris took Baldwin to Istanbul in the 1960s. Biographer David Leeming, who worked as secretary to Baldwin during the period in Istanbul, paints Baldwin during these years as an indefatigable party-goer, with an almost infinite capacity to consume liquor and to get himself into compromising sexual situations. He describes Baldwin as suicidal on many occasions, with well-meaning friends intervening just in the nick of time to prevent some disastrous consequence. Yet for all his personal and psychological lapses, Baldwin remained strikingly productive, with novels, essays, and other creative works pouring from his typewriter.

Out of New York and America physically, but never spiritually or imaginatively, Baldwin returned to his home territory to complete several creative works. Another Country (1962) uses New York, Paris, and Alabama as settings for a variety of characters trying to resolve issues of sexual and racial identities. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beak Street Could Talk (1974), and Just above My Head (1979) all take Baldwin symbolically and physically back to New York, as characters encounter blatant racism, destructively insensitive police and legal systems, and systemic as well as individual obstacles to personal fulfillment.

In the early 1980s, Baldwin traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, to interview persons intimately affected by the Atlanta child murders that took place in 1980 and 1981. He produced his penultimate collection of essays, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), about those murders. Not as powerful in conception or execution as his earlier collections of essays, the volume nonetheless reveals a Baldwin eternally committed to racial justice in a country that professes to be democratic and that has sufficient resources for each citizen to reap the fruits of that designation. Baldwin's final collection of essays, The Price of the Ticket (1985), includes previously published as well as new material.

The late 1970s to mid-1980s found Baldwin constantly on planes between Paris and New York, as he accepted various lecturing and teaching commitments in the United States, including an arrangement as a spring semester visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He also accepted teaching appointments at Bowling Green State University and the University of California at Berkeley. As his career moved to a new level, Baldwin easily met the challenges until his very body failed him. He died of cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence shortly after midnight on 1 December 1987.

Bibliography

• Fern Marja Eckman, The Furious Passage of James Baldwin, 1966.
• Stanley Macebuh, James Baldwin: A Critical Study, 1973.
• W. J. Weatherby, Squaring Off: Mailer vs. Baldwin, 1977.
• Louis H. Pratt, James Baldwin, 1978.
• Carolyn Wedin Sylvander, James Baldwin, 1980.
• John W. Roberts, “James Baldwin,” in DLB, vol. 33, Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, eds. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 1984, pp. 3–16.
• Trudier Harris, Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin, 1985.
• Horace A. Porter, Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin, 1989.
• Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989.
• Quincy Troupe, ed., James Baldwin: The Legacy, 1989.
• Randall Kenan, James Baldwin: American Writer, 1994.
• David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography, 1994.
• Trudier Harris, New Essays on Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1996.
• Marcellus Blount, ed., Representing Black Men (1996).
• E. Patrick Johnson, “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African-American Gay Community,” Callaloo 21:2 (Spring 1998): 399–416.
• David R. Anderson, “The Co-Opted Voice: Politics, History, and Self-Expression in James Baldwin's ‘Journey to Atlanta,’” College Language Association Journal 42.3 (1999): 273–289

Trudier Harris

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For more information on James Arthur Baldwin, visit Britannica.com.

The author James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987) achieved international recognition for his bold expressions of African American life in the United States.

James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, on August 2, 1924, the oldest of nine children. His father was a lay preacher in the Holiness-Pentecostal sect, and at the age of 14 Baldwin was also ordained a preacher. At 18 he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, and in 1944 he met Richard Wright, who helped secure a fellowship that allowed Baldwin the financial freedom to devote himself solely to literature. By 1948 Baldwin had concluded that the social tenor of the United States was stifling his creativity, and he went to Europe with the financial assistance of a Rosenwald fellowship. In Europe, Baldwin completed Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955), and Giovanni's Room (1956).

Spokesperson for Civil Rights Movement

Returning to the United States after nine years abroad, Baldwin became known as the most eloquent literary spokesperson for the civil rights of African Americans. A popular speaker on the lecture circuit, Baldwin quickly discovered that social conditions for African Americans had become even more bleak while he was abroad. As the 1960s began - and violence in the South escalated - he became increasingly outraged. Baldwin responded with three powerful books of essays: Nobody Knows My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963), in which he all but predicts the outbursts of black anger to come, and MoreNotes of a Native Son. These highly inflammatory works were accompanied by Another Country (1962), his third novel. Going to Meet the Man (1965) is a group of cogent short stories of the same period. During this time Baldwin's commentary to Richard Avedon's photography was published under the title Nothing Personal (1964), and four years later came another novel, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone.

In addition, the mid-1960s saw Baldwin's two published plays produced on Broadway. The Amen Corner, first staged in Washington, D.C., in 1955, was mounted at New York City's Ethel Barrymore Theatre in April 1965. Similar in tone to Go Tell It on the Mountain, it communicates the religious emotion of the Holiness-Pentecostal sect. Blues for Mr. Charlie, which premiered at Broadway's ANTA Theatre in April 1964, is based on the Emmett Till murder case.

The assassinations of three of Baldwin's friends - civil rights marcher Medgar Evers, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the black Muslim leader Malcolm X - shattered any hopes Baldwin maintained for racial reconciliation in the United States, and he returned to France in the early 1970s. His subsequent works of fiction include If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979). Nonfiction writings of this period include No Name in the Street (1972), The Devil Finds Work (1976), an examination of African Americans in the motion picture industry, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), a consideration of racial issues surrounding the Atlanta child murders of 1979 and 1980. A volume of poetry, Jimmy's Blues was issued in 1985.

Literary Achievement

Baldwin's greatest achievement as a writer was his ability to address American race relations from a psychological perspective. In his essays and fiction he explored the implications of racism for both the oppressed and the oppressor, suggesting repeatedly that all people suffer in a racist climate. Baldwin's fiction and plays also explore the burdens a callous society can impose on a sensitive individual. Two of his best-known works, the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain and the play The Amen Corner were inspired by his years with the Pentecostal church in Harlem. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, for instance, a teenaged boy struggles with a repressive stepfather and experiences a charismatic spiritual awakening. Later Baldwin novels deal frankly with homosexuality and interracial love affairs - love in both its sexual and spiritual forms became an essential component of the quest for self-realization for both Baldwin and his characters.

Themes and Techniques

Baldwin's prose is characterized by a style of beauty and telling power. His language seems deliberately chosen to shock and disturb, arouse, repel, and finally shake the reader out of complacency into a concerned state of action. His major themes are repeated: the terrible pull of love and hate between black and white Americans; the constant war in one possessed by inverted sexuality between guilt or shame and ecstatic abandon; and such moral, spiritual, and ethical values as purity of motive and inner wholeness, the gift of sharing and extending love, the charm of goodness versus evil. He tunes an inner ear to the disturbing social upheaval of contemporary life and to the rewarding ecstasy of artistic achievement. All such positive values are set in continual warfare against racism, industrialism, materialism, and a global power struggle. Everything demeaning to the human spirit is attacked with vigor and righteous indignation.

Final Works

Baldwin remained abroad much of the last 15 years of his life, but he never gave up his American citizenship. The citizens of France nevertheless embraced Baldwin as one of their own, and in 1986 he was accorded one of the country's highest accolades when he was named Commander of the Legion of Honor. He died of stomach cancer, November 30, 1987, in Saint-Paul-de-Vance, France, and was buried in Harlem. One of his last works to see publication during his lifetime was a well-regarded anthology of essays The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985.

Further Reading

Biographical studies include David Adams Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (1994) and William J. Weather by, James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (1989). Aspects of Baldwin's writings are examined in such studies as Bryan R. Washington, The Politics of Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin (1995), R. Jothiprakash, Commitment as a Theme in African American Literature: A Study of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison (1994), Jean-Francois Gounard, The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin (1992), and Horace A. Porter, Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin (1989).

writer

Personal Information

Born August 2, 1924, in New York, NY; died of stomach cancer December 1, 1987, in St. Paul de Vence, France; son of David (a clergyman and factory worker) and Berdis (Jones) Baldwin.
Education: Graduate of De Witt Clinton High School, New York, NY.
Memberships: Congress of Racial Equality (member of national advisory board), American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, International PEN.

Career

Writer, 1944-87. Youth minister at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, New York City, 1938-42; variously employed as a handyman, dishwasher, waiter, and office boy in New York City, and in defense work in Belle Meade, NJ, 1942-46. Lecturer on racial issues in the United States and Europe, 1955-87. Director of play Fortune and Men's Eyes, Istanbul, Turkey, 1970, and film The Inheritance, 1973.

Life's Work

The American Civil Rights Movement had many eloquent spokesmen, but few were better known than James Baldwin. A novelist and essayist of considerable renown, Baldwin found readers of every race and nationality, though his message reflected bitter disappointment in his native land and its white majority. Throughout his distinguished career Baldwin called himself a "disturber of the peace"--one who revealed uncomfortable truths to a society mired in complacency. As early as 1960 he was recognized as an articulate speaker and passionate writer on racial matters, and at his death in 1987 he was lauded as one of the most respected voices--of any race--in modern American letters.

Baldwin's greatest achievement as a writer was his ability to address American race relations from a psychological perspective. In his essays and fiction the author explored the implications of racism for both the oppressed and the oppressor, suggesting repeatedly that whites as well as blacks suffer in a racist climate. In The Black American Writer: Poetry and Drama, Walter Meserve noted: "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."

James Arthur Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem under extremely trying circumstances. The oldest of nine children, he grew up in an environment of rigorous religious observance and dire poverty. His stepfather, an evangelical preacher, was a strict disciplinarian who showed James little love. As John W. Roberts put it in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the relationship between the youngster and his stepfather "served as a constant source of tension during [Baldwin's] 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." During his youth Baldwin read constantly and slipped away as often as he dared to the movies and even to plays. Although perhaps somewhat sheltered from the perils of the streets, Baldwin knew he wanted to be a writer and thus observed his environment very closely. He was an excellent student who earned special attention from many of his teachers.

In the summer of his fourteenth birthday Baldwin underwent a dramatic religious conversion during a service at his father's church. The experience tied him to the Pentecostal faith even more closely; he became a popular junior minister, preaching full sermons while still in his teens. Students of Baldwin's writings see this period as an essential one in his development. The structure of an evangelical sermon, with its fiery language and dire warnings, would translate well onto the page when the young man began to write. As he grew older, however, Baldwin began to question his involvement in Christianity. His outside readings led him to the conclusion that blacks should have little to do with a faith that had 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. College was out of the question--mental instability had crippled his stepfather and the family was desperate. Eventually Baldwin secured a wartime job with the defense industry, working in a factory in Belle Meade, New Jersey. There he was confronted daily by the humiliating regulations of segregation and hostile white workers who taunted him. When his stepfather died Baldwin rebelled against family responsibilities and moved to Greenwich Village, absolutely determined to be a writer. He supported himself doing odd jobs and began writing both a novel and shorter pieces of journalism.

In 1944 Baldwin met one of his heroes, Richard Wright. A respected novelist and lecturer, Wright helped Baldwin win a fellowship that would allow him the financial freedom to work on his writing. The years immediately following World War II saw Baldwin's first minor successes in his chosen field. His pieces appeared in such prestigious publications as the Nation, the New Leader, and Commentary, and he became acquainted with other young would-be writers in New York. Still, Baldwin struggled with his fiction. By 1948 he concluded that the social tenor of the United States was stifling his creativity. Using the funds from yet another fellowship, he embarked for Paris and commenced the most important phase of his career.

"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-discovery that included both an acceptance of his heritage and an admittance of his bisexuality. In Tri-Quarterly Robert A. Bone concluded 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."

In short order Baldwin completed his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and a play, The Amen Corner. In addition to these projects he contributed thoughtful essays to America's most important periodicals and worked occasionally as a journalist. Most critics view Baldwin's essays as his best contribution to American literature. Works like Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name served to illuminate the condition of the black man in American society on the eve of the civil rights era. Baldwin probed the issues of race with emphasis on self-determination, identity, and reality. In The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, C. W. E. Bigsby wrote that Baldwin's central theme in his essays was "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.... 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."

Baldwin's essays tackled complex psychological issues but remained understandable. His achievements enhanced his reputation both among America's intellectuals and with the general public. In the mid-1950s he returned to America and became a popular speaker on the lecture circuit. The author quickly discovered, however, that social conditions for American blacks had become even more bleak. As the 1960s began--and violence in the South escalated--he became increasingly outraged. Baldwin realized that his essays were reaching a white audience and as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum he sought to warn whites about the potential destruction their behavior patterns might wreak. In 1963 he published a long essay, The Fire Next Time, in which he all but predicted the outbursts of black anger to come. The Fire Next Time made bestseller lists, but Baldwin took little comfort in that fact. The assassination of three of his friends--civil rights marcher Medgar Evers, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and black Muslim leader Malcolm X--shattered any hopes the author might have had for racial reconciliation. Completely disillusioned with the United States, he returned to France in the early 1970s and made his home there until his death in 1987.

Baldwin's fiction and plays also explored the burdens a callous society can impose on a sensitive individual. Two of his best-known works, the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain and the play The Amen Corner were inspired by his years with the Pentecostal church in Harlem. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, for instance, a teenaged boy struggles with a repressive stepfather and experiences a charismatic spiritual awakening. Later Baldwin novels dealt frankly with homosexuality and interracial love affairs--love in both its sexual and spiritual forms became an essential component of the quest for self-realization for both the author and his characters. Fred L. Standley noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that Baldwin's concerns as a fiction writer and a dramatist included "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."

Baldwin spent much of the last fifteen years of his life in France, but he never gave up his American citizenship. He once commented that he preferred to think of himself as a "commuter" between countries. That view notwithstanding, the citizens of France embraced Baldwin as one of their own. In 1986 he was accorded one of the country's highest accolades when he was named Commander of the Legion of Honor. Baldwin died of stomach cancer in 1987, leaving several projects unfinished. Those who paid tribute to him on both sides of the Atlantic noted that he had experienced success in theater, fiction, and nonfiction alike--a staggering achievement. One of his last works to see print during his lifetime was a well-regarded anthology of essays, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985. In her book James Baldwin, Carolyn Wedin Sylvander concluded that what emerges from the whole of Baldwin's output 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."

Baldwin was laid to rest in a Harlem cemetery. A funeral service in his honor drew scores of black writers, politicians, entertainers, and other celebrities, many of whom offered fond eulogies for the pioneering author. The New York Times quoted writer Orde Coombs, for one, who said: "Because [Baldwin] 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." Poet and playwright Amiri Baraka likewise commented: "This man traveled the earth like its history and its biographer. 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."

Perhaps the most touching tribute to Baldwin came from the pen of Washington Post columnist Juan Williams. Williams concluded: "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."

Awards

Eugene F. Saxton fellowship, 1945; Rosenwald fellowship, 1948; Guggenheim fellowship, 1954; National Institute of Arts and Letters grant for literature, 1956; Ford Foundation grant, 1959; George Polk Memorial Award, 1963; American Book Award nomination, 1980, for Just above My Head; named Commander of the Legion of Honor (France), 1986.

Works

Fiction

• Go Tell It on the Mountain, Knopf, 1953.
• Giovanni's Room, Dial, 1956.
• Another Country, Dial, 1962.
• Going To Meet the Man, Dial, 1965.
• Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, Dial, 1968.
• If Beale Street Could Talk, Dial, 1974.
• Just Above My Head, Dial, 1979.

Nonfiction

• Autobiographical Notes, Knopf, 1953.
• Notes of a Native Son, Beacon Press, 1955.
• Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, Dial, 1961.
• The Fire Next Time, Dial, 1963.
• No Name in the Street, Dial, 1972.
• The Devil Finds Work, Dial, 1976.
• The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Holt, 1985.
• The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985, St. Martin's, 1985.

Plays

• The Amen Corner (first produced in Washington, D.C. at Howard University, 1955; produced on Broadway at Ethel Barrymore Theatre, April 15, 1965), Dial, 1968.
• Blues for Mister Charlie (first produced on Broadway at ANTA Theatre, April 23, 1964), Dial, 1964.

Other

• Contributor of book reviews and essays to numerous periodicals, including Harper's, the Nation, Esquire, Playboy the Partisan Review, Mademoiselle, and the New Yorker. .

Further Reading

Books

• The Black American Writer, Volume II: Poetry and Drama, edited by C. W. E. Bigsby, Everett/Edwards, 1969.
• Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The New Consciousness 1941-1968, Gale, 1987.
• Critical Essays on James Baldwin, edited by Fred Standley and Nancy Standley, G. K. Hall, 1981.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume II: American Novelists Since World War II, 1978, Volume VIII: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981, Volume XXXIII: Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, 1984.
• The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, edited by Warren French, Everett/Edwards, 1970.
• James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Kenneth Kinnamon, Prentice-Hall, 1974.
• Pratt, Louis Hill, James Baldwin, Twayne, 1978.
• Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin, James Baldwin, Frederick Ungar, 1980.

Periodicals

• New York Times, May 3, 1964; April 16, 1965; May 31, 1968; February 2, 1969; May 21, 1971; May 17, 1974; June 4, 1976; September 4, 1977; September 21, 1979; September 23, 1979; November 11, 1983; January 10, 1985; January 14, 1985; December 2, 1987; December 9, 1987.
• Tri-Quarterly, Winter, 1965.
• Washington Post, December 2, 1987; December 9, 1987.

(1924-1987), African-American novelist and social critic. Born in Harlem, Baldwin grew up poor and unhappy, especially after his mother's marriage in 1927 to a domineering fundamentalist minister from New Orleans who seemed to hate his stepson. As a boy, he read prodigiously. He also became, in his teens, a junior minister whose oratory attracted a growing congregation. He subsequently lost his faith, however, and left Harlem to work in New Jersey. His experience of racism and segregation there drove him to Greenwich Village where he found a somewhat more congenial racial climate and more opportunities for writing.

In 1947, Baldwin began his literary career with book reviews in the Nation and New Leader and attracted attention with an article on black-Jewish relations and a short story in Commentary. Seeking greater personal freedom, he moved to Paris in 1948. In his essay "Everybody's Protest Novel," about Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Richard Wright's Native Son, he questioned the use of fiction to advocate social change. In 1953, Baldwin published his first novel, the largely autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain. Set in Harlem, the book recounted the difficulties of his adolescence and his struggles with his stepfather. Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays, commented skillfully on racism in America, and his novel Giovanni's Room (1956) was one of the boldest treatments of homosexuality in American literature to that time.

In 1956, Baldwin returned home to observe the burgeoning civil rights movement. A long trip through the South resulted in a series of highly rhetorical essays, which, collected in Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963), led to his recognition as a major American essayist and a leading critic of racism. Between these books came Another Country (1962), a sensational, best-selling novel about racism, love, and sexuality. The three books established Baldwin as an international celebrity, sought out by the press and traveling among homes in France, Turkey, and the United States.

In 1964, his controversial drama Blues for Mister Charlie, about one of the most heinous crimes of the civil rights era, ran for 150 performances on Broadway. Some critics found it complex, but others thought it confused and propagandistic. Another play, The Amen Corner, first staged in 1955 and revived on Broadway in 1968, drew on his religious background and left unsettled the question of his competence as a dramatist. His later novels, none of which achieved the success of his earlier work, included another study of the sixties in America, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), the best-selling If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and perhaps his most ambitious book, Just Above My Head (1979). The last, especially, testified to Baldwin's continuing fascination with homosexuality and with the place of music, especially gospel, in black culture; it also reflected the less confrontational attitude of his later years. His nonfictional writing was collected in The Price of the Ticket (1985).

Especially in his earlier novels and essays, Baldwin brought to the often turbulent American discussion of race an almost unsurpassed understanding of its various psychological nuances and consequences. His complicated sense of himself as an artist, a black American, a homosexual, and a man of religion (even after he lost his faith) was well served by high intelligence, distinct literary ability, and a will toward love, peace, and reconciliation in spite of the rage and bitterness that racism inspired. His best work continues to afford keen insights into perhaps the most intractable of American social problems.

Bibliography:

John W. Roberts, "James Baldwin," in Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, eds., Dictionary of Literary Biography (1985), 33:3-16; Fred L. Standley, "James Baldwin," in J. M. Brook, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography (Yearbook, 1987) (1988), 219-225.

Author:

Arnold Rampersad

See also Literature.

Baldwin, James, 1924-87, American author, b. New York City. He spent an impoverished boyhood in Harlem, became a Pentecostal preacher at 14, and left the church three years later. He moved to Paris in 1947 and his first two novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), reflecting his experience as a young preacher, and Giovanni's Room (1956), which dealt with his homosexuality, as well as the intensely personal, racially charged essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), were written while he lived there. Baldwin returned to the United States in 1957 and participated in the civil-rights movement, later returning to France where he lived for the remainder of his life. Another Country (1962), a bitter novel about sexual relations and racial tension, received critical acclaim, as did the perceptive essays in what is probably his most celebrated book, The Fire Next Time (1963). His eloquence and unsparing honesty made Baldwin one of the most influential authors of his time. Other works include the play Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964); a volume of short stories, Going to Meet the Man (1964); and the novels If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), the story of a young black couple victimized by the judicial system, and Just above My Head (1979). Collections of essays include Nobody Knows My Name (1961), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Price of a Ticket (1985). His Collected Essays was published in 1998 and The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings in 2010.

Bibliography

See biographies by W. J. Wetherby (1989), J. Campbell (1991), and D. Leeming (1994); interviews in James Baldwin: The Legacy (1989, ed. by Q. Troupe) and Conversations with James Baldwin (1989, ed. by F. L. Standley and L. H. Pratt); studies by L. H. Pratt (1985), H. A. Porter (1989), D. A. McBride, ed. (1999), D. Q. Miller (2000), L. O. Scott (2002), H. Bloom, ed. (2006), D. Field, ed. (2009), and M. J. Zaborowska (2009).

(1924-1987)

1953	Go Tell It on the Mountain. Baldwin's first novel, about a day in the life of congregation members of Harlem's storefront Temple of Fire Baptised, incorporates, through flashbacks, several generations in the struggles of African Americans. The book establishes Baldwin as one of the most significant black novelists since Richard Wright. Baldwin was born in Harlem. His stepfather was a storefront Pentecostal preacher, and the writer himself preached for a time in various Harlem churches.
1955	Notes of a Native Son. Baldwin's essay collection supplies an account of his boyhood in Harlem, his assessment of black intellectuals, and a harsh critique of Richard Wright. A second volume of reflections, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, would appear in 1961.
1956	Giovanni's Room. Baldwin's second novel presents a young white man in Paris who is conflicted over his homosexuality. The novel represents a considerable breakthrough in treating the formerly taboo subject and is praised by critic Stanley Macebuh as "one of the few novels in America in which the homosexual sensibility is treated with some measure of creative seriousness."
1961	Nobody Knows My Name. The title work of Baldwin's collection is an essay inspired by Baldwin's trip to the South after returning to the United States from his self-imposed exile in Paris. The collection deals at length with the struggle for civil rights but also includes deeply personal meditations on the artist's relationship with society, with his fellow writers, and his homosexuality.
1962	Another Country. Baldwin's third novel depicts a series of interracial and bisexual couplings in New York City during the 1950s, using the suicide of an angry jazz musician as a catalyst. It prompts obscenity charges, efforts to ban the work, and mixed reviews.
1963	The Fire Next Time. Baldwin's essay collection on racial matters includes an autobiographical portrait of his youth and a critique of the Black Muslim movement, in which he voices his admiration of Malcolm X but also his opposition to the call for racial separation.
1964	Blues for Mister Charlie. Baldwin's drama is inspired by the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Baldwin uses the case and the acquittal of the murderers as a potent indictment of American race relations. Baldwin's earlier play, The Amen Corner, first produced at Howard University in 1954, about a black clergywoman who tries to turn her son against his father, would reach Broadway in 1965.
1965	Going to Meet the Man. Having produced a photographic essay, Nothing Personal, with Richard Avedon in 1964, Baldwin issues a story collection that includes one of his most acclaimed works, "Sonny's Blues," about a young man's struggle for identity and self-expression.
1968	Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. In Baldwin's novel a successful black actor stricken by a heart attack surveys his youth in Harlem, his family, an affair with a white actress, and his current relationship with his black male lover.
1972	No Name in the Street. This work collects autobiographical fragments and statements on the author's positions on racial matters, along with a recollection of Martin Luther King Jr. In it Baldwin states that "as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people of any color, to be found in the world today."
1974	If Beale Street Could Talk. The novel concerns the effort to clear the name of a black man falsely accused of raping a Puerto Rican woman. Critics are divided over the book's achievement, with many finding it contrived and sentimental and others impressed by Baldwin's first extensive treatment of an artist protagonist.
1976	The Devil Finds Work. Baldwin's essay collection concerns the history of blacks in films.
1979	Just Above My Head. Baldwin's final novel treats a homosexual gospel singer from Harlem and his family relationships. The book displays a calmer, more accepting perspective, and Baldwin, following publication, would remark that he had come "full circle," that "From Go Tell It on the Mountain to Just Above My Head sums up something of my experience... that sets me free to go someplace else".
1985	The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Baldwin's penultimate collection of essays memorializes his thoughts about the serial murders of African American children in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1980 and 1981. After conducting his own investigation, Baldwin interprets the case of the alleged murderer in light of his skeptical view of American racial justice.

Quotes:

"Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours."

"People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned."

"The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated."

"It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."

"A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled."

"Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks."

See more famous quotes by James Baldwin