James Baldwin

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).

Childhood

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.

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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.)

First writings and move to Europe

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.

Civil rights activism and The Fire Next Time

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.

Later career and honors

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.

Legacy

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.”