“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was
born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”
—James Baldwin, "Autobiographical Notes" from Notes of a Native Son,
1955
James Baldwin: Born August 2, 1924 in Harlem, NY, Died December 1 1987, St. Paul-de-Vence, France
The first of nine children of Berdis (Jones) a clergyman and a factory worker, David (step-father), in Harlem, NY. Baldwin was a storefront preacher for three years starting at age 14. His writing started as a way to escape his stern stepfather. He attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School and DeWitt Clinton High School.
During the 1960's Baldwin returned to the United States and became politically active in support of civil rights.
Baldwin wrote novels, poetry, essays and a screenplay in the later years of his life. He died of stomach cancer at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France.
James Baldwin - Mini Bio (© 2012 A+E Television Networks, LLC. All Rights Reserved)
The
Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin
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by James Badwin, edited by Randall Kenan
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (August 24, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307378829
ISBN-13: 978-0307378828
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
The Cross of Redemption is a revelation by an American literary
master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews
that have never before appeared in book form.
James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures
of the past century, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting
our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin
discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American
president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious
fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of
black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary
masters; and the role of the writer in our society.
Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and
important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American
writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal
and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, 'If van Gogh was
our nineteenth-century artist-saint, Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century
one.'
Read an essay from this collection: "Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare"
The
Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985
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Hardcover: 704 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1 edition (September 15, 1985)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312643063
The works of James Baldwin constitute one of the major contributions to American literature in the twentieth century, and nowhere is this more evident than in The Price of the Ticket, a compendium of nearly fifty years of Baldwin's powerful nonfiction writing. With truth and insight, these personal, prophetic works speak to the heart of the experience of race and identity in the United States. Here are the full texts of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Devil Finds Work, along with dozens of other pieces, ranging from a 1948 review of Raintree Country to a magnificent introduction to this book that, as so many of Mr. Baldwin's works do, combines his intensely private experience with the deepest examination of social interaction between the races. In a way, The Price of the Ticket is an intellectual history of the twentieth-century American experience; in another, it is autobiography of the highest order.
Go Tell it on the Mountain
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Amazon
Hardcover: 320
pages
Publisher: Modern Library; New Ed edition (September 26, 1995)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679601546
Read a review from Scared Fire
From the Inside Flap
"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was
ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain,
first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has
established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision,
psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is
at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a
fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the
stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one
Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's
spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new
possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans
understand themselves.
From the Back Cover
"Baldwin's way of seeing, his clarity, precision, and eloquence are
unique....He manages to be concrete, particular...Yet also transcendent,
arching above the immediacy of an occasion or crisis. He speaks as great
black gospel music speaks, through metaphor, parable, rhythm."
'John
Edgar Wideman
Baldwin's Harlem: A
Biography of James Baldwin
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by Herb Boyd
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Atria (January 8, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 074329307X
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
"Herb Boyd's study of Baldwin and Harlem features vivid literary portraits of a powerful writer in sometimes controversial dialogue with other major figures of his era. It also centers Baldwin's Harlem in a memorable, necessary way. Boyd's book is fascinating and authoritative on a subject that he knows well and writes about with insight and sympathy." ' Arnold Rampersad, author of Ralph Ellison: A Biography
Baldwin's Harlem is an intimate
portrait of the life and genius of one
of our most brilliant literary minds:
James Baldwin.
Perhaps no other writer is as synonymous with Harlem as James Baldwin
(1924-1987). The events there that shaped his youth greatly influenced
Baldwin's work, much of which focused on his experiences as a black man
in white America. Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time, Notes
of a Native Son, and Giovanni's Room are just a few of his classic
fiction and nonfiction books that remain an essential part of the
American canon.
In Baldwin's Harlem, award-winning journalist Herb Boyd combines
impeccable biographical research with astute literary criticism, and
reveals to readers Baldwin's association with Harlem on both
metaphorical and realistic levels. For example, Boyd describes Baldwin's
relationship with Harlem Renaissance poet laureate Countee Cullen, who
taught Baldwin French in the ninth grade. Packed with telling anecdotes,
Baldwin's Harlem illuminates the writer's diverse views and impressions
of the community that would remain a consistent presence in virtually
all of his writing.
Baldwin's Harlem provides an intelligent and enlightening look at one of
America's most important literary enclaves.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
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ISBN: 067974472X
Format: Paperback, 106pp
Pub. Date: February 1993
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.
Tell
Me how Long the Train's Been Gone
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via Amazon
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0385274696
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Incorporated
Pub. Date: January 1985
At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is
nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death,
Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and
terrifyingly vulnerable.
For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into
the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss,
shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love
affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make
irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of
being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total
racial war. Overpowering in its vitality, extravagant in the intensity of
its feeling, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is a major work of
American literature.
Giovanni's
Room
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ISBN: 0385334583
Format: Paperback, 176pp
Pub. Date: June 2000
Publisher: Dell Publishing Company, Incorporated
"Giovanni's Room traces one man's struggle with his sexual identity. In a
1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous
liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself confronting secret
desires that jeopardize the conventional life he envisions for himself.
After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair
with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured as he oscillates
between the two." "Now a classic of gay literature, Baldwin's haunting and
controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality.
Examining the agonizing mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined
yet beautifully restrained narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex
story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight."
―From Book Jacket
Go
Tell It on the Mountain
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Publisher: Dell Publishing Company, Incorporated
Date Published: May 1976
Format: Mass Market Paperbound
James Baldwin's portrayal of black people in Harlem caught up in a dramatic struggle, and
of a society confronting inevitable change.
Quote
From Sacred Fire:
Go Tell It on the Mountain is considered to be James Baldwin's greatest novel. Like much
of Baldwin's writing, it draws heavily on his own intense childhood experiences with religious doubt,
racism, sexual ambivalence, and a complex relationship with a difficult father. The entire
book takes place on the fourteenth birthday of John Grimes, the son of a
fire-and-brimstone revivalist preacher, who finds himself increasingly alienated from his
bitter, authoritarian father, his religious faith, and his community. Baldwin treats the
young man's battle with Manichaean choices—flesh or spirit, community or
individualism, conversion or heresy—with masterful sensitivity and insight.
Another
Country
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Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: January 1993
Format: Trade Paper
From The Publisher:
Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other
locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political,
artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting
men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and
hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the
best and worst intentions of liberal America in the early 1970s.
If
Beale Street Could Talk
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Publisher: Dell Publishing Company, Incorporated
Date Published: November 1985
Format: Trade Paper
A love story about two badly frightened but intensely brave, black young people.
"If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our
20th-century one."
'Michael Ondaatje
"A major work of black American fiction... His best novel yet, even
Baldwin's most devoted readers are due to be stunned by it."
'The New Republic
"Emotional dynamite... a powerful assault upon the cynicism that seems
today to drain our determination to confront deep social problems."
'Library Journal
"A moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality
that it strikes us as timeless."
'The New York Times Book Review
Going
to Meet the Man
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Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: April 1995
Format: Trade Paper
A collection of eight short stories that explore with devastating frankness the roots of
love, hate, and racial conflict. By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying, this is
a major work by one of America's quintessential writers.
Other Books by Baldwin include
The Amen Corner
Blues for Mister Charlie: A Play
Daddy Was a Number Runner, Feminist Press Ed. with Louise Meriwether, Nellie McKay
The Devil Finds Work
The Evidence of Things Not Seen
The Fire Next Time
Jimmy's Blues: Selected Poems, Us Pbk Ed.
Just above My Head
King, Malcolm, Baldwin:
No Name in the Street
Nobody Knows My Name
Notes of a Native Son
One Day when I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley's "The Autobiography
of Malcolm X"
A Rap on Race
