James Baldwin( best) 

was an essayist, writer, and dramatist who was born in New York, New York, on August 2, 1924, and passed away in Saint-Paul de Vence, France, on December 1, 1987. His eloquence and passion on the topic of race in America made him one of the most significant voices of the 20th century. Baldwin, a writer of remarkably lucid and psychologically insightful prose, skillfully and sharply tackled race relations i n his writing. Notably in Giovanni’s Room (1956), he was among the first Black writers to incorporate LGBT themes into fiction, writing with a candor that was very provocative at the time. Among his writings are the books Another and Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).Country (1962), the essay collections Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963), and the plays The Amen Corner (1954) and Blues for Mister Charlie

•  Names for Facts: James Arthur Baldwin

Born in New York City on August 2, 1924
Dec. 1, 1987, at the age of sixty-three • Famous Works in France”Go Tell It on the Mountain”; “Another Country”; “Blues for Mister Charlie”; “Giovanni’s Room”; “Going to Meet the Man”; “If Beale Street Could Talk”; “Just Above My Head”; “Nobody Knows My Name”; “Notes of a Native Son”; “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone”; “The Fire Next Time”; “The Price of the Ticket”
function in the American civil rights movement

Childhood
Baldwin, the oldest of nine children, was raised in poverty in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. Emma Berdis Jones, a single mother who moved to New York from Maryland, gave birth to him. She married David Baldwin, a Baptist minister who had relocated from New Orleans to the north, when her son was approximately three years old. James Baldwin wrote plays, poems, and short tales from an early age. As a child, he took solace in reading

James Baldwin American authorExpert first and best novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, as well as in his play The Amen Corner, which is about a female evangelist. Baldwin’s stern stepfather, with whom he had a tense relationship, had an influence on his preaching. Baldwin gave up preaching, yet that time in his life was crucial to his growth as a writer. Baldwin stated in an interview that was shown in the 1989 posthumous documentary The Price of the Ticket: “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.”initial writings and relocation to EuropeJames Baldwin American authorExpert

Following his high school graduation, Baldwin settled into a restless phase of self-study, literary apprenticeship, and low-paying occupations in New York City’s bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village. Journal and magazine book reviews were his first published works. After Baldwin met the well-known American literary giant Richard Wright in 1944, Wright assisted Baldwin in obtaining a grant of money so that he could continue writing his first book and sustain himself. Baldwin started to have his writing published in esteemed magazines in the meantime. Among these was the essay “The Harlem Ghetto,” which focused on the socioeconomic

circumstances in his home neighborhood and was published in Commentary in 1948. It attracted a lot of attention. In the same year, hoping to get away from America’s racism (and the homophobia of Harlem), he departed from America and relocated to Paris, where he spent the following eight years. (In subsequent years, starting in 1969, he dubbed himself a “transatlantic commuter,” alternating between living in New York and New England, the south of France, and Turkey on several occasions for extended periods of time.)Baldwin wrote “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), a critical article written when he was residing in Paris that compared Wright’s well-known 1940 work Native Son negatively to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was the first of Baldwin’s many scathing and contentious criticisms of the works of his old

instructor that he would write during his career. Go Tell It on the Mountain was finished by Baldwin in 1952 while he and his boyfriend, the painter Lucien Happersberger, were residing in a small Swiss Alps village. A year later, the book was released to favourable reviews. Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin’s debut book of essays, was published in 1955. It contains essays on the life and death of his stepfather, literary and cinematic criticism, and the experience of being an African American exile in Europe. The Amen Corner, his debut play, was staged at Howard University in the same year. It made its Broadway debut in 1965. Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin’s second book, was written with Happersberger in mind. The protagonist of the book, an American in Paris who is divided between his feelings for a guy and a woman, lives in the white world. Baldwin’s first novel publisher, Knopf, rejected the book because of its homosexual theme; nonetheless, Dial Press eventually published it.

Activism for civil rights and The Fire Next Time

After returning to the United States in 1957, Baldwin got involved in the civil rights movement again, traveling around the South and eventually making friends with leaders of the movement like Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. In 1961, Baldwin published another collection of essays called Nobody Knows My Name, which tackles issues like Southern society in William Faulkner’s fiction, sexual identity in André Gide’s work, and Ingmar Bergman’s films. The theme of Black-White relations in the United States also played a major role in Baldwin’s novel Another Country (1962), which tackles racial and sexual issues through a plot involving interracial relationships and bisexuality.

The majority of the November 17, 1962, issue of The New Yorker magazine was devoted to a lengthy piece written by Baldwin discussing the Black Muslim separatist movement and other facets of the civil rights movement. The piece became a blockbuster in book form as The Fire Next Time (1963), along with a letter he wrote to his nephew that was published in The Progressive to mark the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Fire Next Time was a powerful work with enormous societal impact that served as a stark warning to white Americans about the repercussions of their treatment of African Americans. Drawing inspiration from a Black spiritual, the article concluded with foreboding words:

We have the potential to end the racial nightmare, accomplish our country, and alter global history if we—that is, the relatively conscious Whites and the relatively conscious Blacks—do not fail in our duty now. We must act like lovers and insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others. The fulfillment of that prophecy, which was rewritten from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us if we do not dare everything now: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next this

Baldwin participated actively in the civil rights struggle throughout 1963. In an effort to start a conversation between the government and activists, he met with U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy along with a group of other artists. (The meeting broke up with bitter disappointment.) In addition, he organized a march in support of the American civil rights movement in Paris and took part in the historic August 28 March on Washington. However, Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X, a close friend of Baldwin’s, claimed that the reason Baldwin was not allowed to speak at the latter event was that “they wouldn’t let Baldwin get up there because they know Baldwin is liable to say anything.”The next year, Baldwin released Blues for Mister Charlie, a protest play denouncing racial injustice (the phrase “Mister Charlie” is a Black slang for a white man). Blues for Mister Charlie, which was loosely inspired on the 1955 murder of African American youth Emmett Till by two white men, received mixed reviews during its Broadway run. Going to Meet the Man, Baldwin’s debut collection of short tales, was released in 1965. He took part in the Selma March in Alabama that March, which was organized by Martin Luther King Jr. to defend the state’s voting rights for African Americans. The march went from Selma to Montgomery.

Subsequent professional and accolades

Baldwin was frequently asked to talk on the civil rights struggle on television because of his captivating and passionate speaking style. He engaged in a discussion with conservative author William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1965 at the University of Cambridge in England, centered around the question, “The American Dream: Is it at the expense of the American Negro?” During the debate, he said something that stuck out the most: about how African American identity is formed and how white European and American “systems of reality” collide:

The audience gave Baldwin a standing ovation that lasted for one minute when he finished speaking. (The response to Buckley’s speech was not the same.)

In 1968, Baldwin consented to create the screenplay for The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), written by Alex Haley, for a motion picture. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. But Baldwin stopped working on the script when King was assassinated in April 1968. (In 1972, he finally turned the screenplay’s workings into a book.) Along with a compilation of autobiographical writings called The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin also released the novels Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979). However, none of his following creations attained the

Despite the early work’s critical and popular popularity, he had trouble getting publishers interested in some of his later works. More radical Black writers and leaders of the 1960s and 1970s, like poet and playwright Amiri Baraka and activist Eldridge Cleaver, shunned Baldwin because they disagreed with his more pacific viewpoints. (Cleaver also made overtly homophobic remarks in her critique of Baldwin.)

Baldwin gave lectures and taught at many American institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, including Mount Holyoke College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of California at Berkeley. Throughout his career, he received fellowships from the Guggenheim (1954), Ford Foundation (1958), and George Polk Award for Journalism (1963).and in 1986, he was admitted into France’s most esteemed honor, the Legion of Honour. He passed away from stomach cancer at the age of 63 while residing at his southern French house.

History

Baldwin passed away in 1987, yet his writings kept inspiring younger authors and intellectuals. With the emergence of activist groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM), an international social movement founded in the US in 2013 to combat racism and anti-Black violence, including police brutality, his writing on racial and social issues gained prominence in the 21st century. LGBTQ writers and activists have applauded Baldwin for his groundbreaking examination of sexual identity and gay relationships in his writing. There are now a ton of books and documentaries that honor Baldwin and give additional background on the significance of his life and work.The National Book Award-winning novel Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which was written in the form of a letter to the author’s son in 2015, was heavily influenced by Baldwin’s letter to his nephew in The Fire Next Time. I Am Not Your Negro, a 2016 Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Raoul Peck, focused on Baldwin. In addition to historical interviews with Baldwin, the film combined modern footage of the BLM movement with archival footage of the civil rights era. The story for it was adapted from an incomplete autobiography written by Baldwin called Remember This House, which described his associations with the three assassinated civil rights leaders—Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Additionally in 2016, Jesmyn Ward, a memoirist and novelist, edited The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race is an anthology of poetry and essays written by well-known African American authors, such as Edwidge Danticat, Claudia Rankine, Isabel Wilkerson, and Kevin Young. Baldwin’s plays and fiction, particularly his 1974 book If Beale Street Could Talk, about two young lovers in Harlem, also attracted fresh interest. Renowned filmmaker Barry Jenkins, whose Oscar-winning LGBTQ coming-of-age picture Moonlight (2016) Jenkins once called as “sort of the child of Giovanni’s Room and The Fire Next Time,” turned it into a feature film of the same name in 2018.