JAMES BALDWIN (WRITER)

'James Arthur Baldwin' (August 2, 1924 – November 30, 1987) was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist best known for his novel ''Go Tell It on the Mountain''.
Most of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as for the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups could be assumed.^[1]

Contents

Early life and career

Inspiration and relationships

Later life and death

Literary career

Legacy

Bibliography

Notes

Published as

External links

Early life and career

Baldwin was born in 1924, the first of his mother's nine children.^[2] He never met his biological father and may never have even known the man's identity.^[3] Instead, he considered his stepfather, David Baldwin, as his father figure. David, a factory worker and a store-front preacher, was allegedly very cruel at home.^[3] While his father opposed his literary aspirations,^[5] Baldwin found support from a teacher as well from the mayor of New York City, Fiorello H. LaGuardia. At age 14, Baldwin joined the small Fireside Pentecostal Church in Harlem. After he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he concentrated more on his literary career.

Inspiration and relationships

One source of support came from an admired older writer Richard Wright, whom he called "the greatest black writer in the world for me." Wright and Baldwin became friends for a short time and Wright helped him to secure the ''Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award''. Baldwin titled a collection of essays ''Notes of a Native Son'', in clear reference to Wright's novel ''Native Son''. However, Baldwin's 1949 essay ''"Everybody's Protest Novel"'' ended the two authors' friendship because Baldwin asserted that Wright's novel ''Native Son'', like Harriet Beecher Stowe's ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'', lacked credible characters and psychological complexity. However, during an interview with Julius Lester, ^[6] Baldwin explained that his adoration for Wright remained: "I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself."
Another major influence on Baldwin's life was the African-American painter Beauford Delaney. In ''The Price of the Ticket'' (1985), Baldwin describes Delaney as "the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my teacher and I as his pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow."

Later life and death

Baldwin, like many American authors of the time, left to live in Europe for an extended period of time beginning in 1948.^[7][8] His first destination was Paris, where Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, and many others had lived during their writing careers. When Baldwin returned to the United States, he became actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement.^[9] He marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. to Washington, D.C.^[10] During the early 1980s, Baldwin was on the faculty of the Five Colleges in Western Massachusetts. While there, he mentored Mount Holyoke College future playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. Baldwin did not remain in the United States long, however, and he was a repeated expatriate for the rest of his life, spending long stints in Istanbul, Turkey^[11] and in St.-Paul-de-Vence in Southern France, where he died of esophageal cancer in 1987 at the age of 63.

Literary career

In 1953, Baldwin's first novel, ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'', an autobiographical bildungsroman novel, was published. Baldwin's first collection of essays, ''Notes of a Native Son'', appeared two years after. As someone who detested labels, Baldwin never allowed this debate to flourish: he continued to experiment with literary form throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known.
Baldwin's second novel, ''Giovanni's Room'', stirred controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content. Baldwin was again resisting labels with the publication of this work:Balfour (2001) p 51 despite the reading public's expectations that he would publish works dealing with the African American experience, ''Giovanni's Room'' is exclusively about white characters.Balfour (2001) p 51 Baldwin's next two novels, ''Another Country'' and ''Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone'', are sprawling, experimental works dealing with black and white characters and with heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual characters. These novels struggle to contain the turbulence of the 1960s: they are saturated with a sense of violent unrest and outrage.
Baldwin's lengthy essay "Down at the Cross" (frequently called "The Fire Next Time" after the title of the book in which it was published) similarly showed the seething discontent of the 1960s in novel form. The essay was originally published in two oversized issues of The New Yorker and landed Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 while Baldwin was touring the south speaking about the restive Civil Rights movement. The essay talked about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. Baldwin's next book-length essay, ''No Name in the Street'', also discussed his own experience in the context of the later 1960s, specifically the assassinations of three of his personal friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King.
Baldwin's writings of the 1970s and 1980s have been largely overlooked by critics. The assassinations of black leaders in the 1960s as well as Eldridge Cleaver's vicious homophobic attack on Baldwin in ''Soul on Ice'' along with his return to southern France contributed to the sense that he was not in touch with his readership. Always true to his own convictions rather than to the tastes of others, Baldwin continued to write what he wanted to write. His two novels written in the 1970s, ''If Beale Street Could Talk'' and ''Just Above My Head'', placed a strong emphasis on the importance of black families, and he concluded his career by publishing a volume of poetry, ''Jimmy's Blues'', as well as another book-length essay, ''The Evidence of Things Not Seen'', which was an extended meditation inspired by the Atlanta Child Murders of the early 1980s.

Legacy

Baldwin's influence on other writers has been profound: Toni Morrison edited the Library of America editions of Baldwin's fiction and essays, and a recent collection of critical essays links these two writers.
In 2005 the USPS created a First-Class Postage Stamp dedicated to him which featured him on the front, and on the back of the peeling paper had a short biography. One of Baldwin's richest short stories, "Sonny's Blues," appears in many anthologies of short fiction used in introductory college literature classes.

Bibliography

★ ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'' (autobiographical novel; 1953)

★ ''The Amen Corner'' (play; 1954)

★ ''Notes of a Native Son'' (1955)

★ ''Giovanni's Room'' (novel; 1956)

★ ''Sonny's Blues'' (1957)

★ '' (essays and stories; 1961)

★ ''Another Country'' (novel; 1962)

★ ''The Fire Next Time'' (essays; 1963)

★ ''Blues for Mister Charlie'' (play; 1964)

★ ''Going to Meet the Man'' (stories; 1965)

★ ''Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone'' (novel; 1968)

★ ''No Name in the Street'' (essays; 1972)

★ ''If Beale Street Could Talk'' (novel; 1974)

★ ''The Devil Finds Work'' (essays; 1976)

★ ''Just Above My Head'' (novel; 1979)

★ ''Jimmy's blues'' (poems; 1983)

★ ''The Evidence of Things Not Seen'' (essays; 1985)

★ ''The Price of the Ticket'' (essays; 1985)
Together with others:

★ ''Nothing personal (with Richard Avedon (photogr.))'' (1964)

★ ''A Rap on Race (with Margaret Mead)'' (1971)

★ ''One day when I was lost'' (orig.: A. Haley; 1972)

★ ''A Dialogue (with Nikki Giovanni)'' (1973)

★ ''Little man, little man (with Yoran Cazac''; for children; 1976)(hell on earth)''(1989)

Notes

1. Gournardoo (1992) p 158 p 148-200
2. Jean-François Gounardoo, Joseph J. Rodgers, The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Greenwood Press, 1992.
3. Gournardoo (1992) p 149-150
4. Gournardoo (1992) p 149-150
5. Gournardoo (1992) p 150
6. New York Times, Baldwin Reflections
7. Gournardoo (1992) p 152
8. Lawrie Balfour; The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. Cornell University Press, 2001
9. Gournardoo (1992) p 153-158
10. Gounardo, p 156
11. Gournardoo (1992) p 153-156

Published as

★ ''Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Going to Meet the Man'' (Toni Morrison, ed.) (Library of America, 1998) ISBN 978-1-88301151-2.

★ ''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'' (Toni Morrison, ed.) (Library of America, 1998) ISBN 978-1-88301152-9

External links

★ James Baldwin at Find a Grave

★ Comprehensive Resource of James Baldwin Information

★ James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket distributed by California Newsreel

★ "An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" by James Baldwin

★ Baldwin's ''American Masters'' page

★ Baldwin's C-Span page on American Writers

★ Baldwin in the Literary Encyclopedia

★ Audio files of speeches and interviews at UC Berkeley

★ Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles