James Baldwin
James Baldwin was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth
century -- a novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist, he was a
vocal, sometimes strident critic of race relations in America, and years
ahead of his time in his portrayal of homosexuality in such novels as
Another Country and
Giovanni's Room.
Though he would eventually inhabit the most rarefied of intellectual
circles, Baldwin was born into poverty in Harlem in 1924, the son of a
fundamentalist preacher and the oldest of nine children. In his
semi-autobiographical
Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin wrote
of his years as a teenage preacher in a revivalist church. This early
oratorical experience would help shape his angry, uncompromising writing
style, which often offended both friends and foes.
Baldwin's early work was his most popular and critically successful. The
brief, poignant Giovanni's Room, (1956) about an American in
Paris forced to choose between a man and a woman, has become a gay
classic. Another Country (1962), a novel about the jealousies and
friendships among a group of Greenwich Village bohemians, also deals
with the subject of homosexuality, though less centrally.
Though Baldwin aspired to be remembered for his fiction, he is generally
considered a better essayist than novelist. His three most important
collections -- Notes of a Native Son (1955),
Nobody Knows My
Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963) -- were
passionate, personal indictments of racism in America, and became
required reading for whites and blacks alike.
Like many African Americans of his day, Baldwin fled the bigotry of his
native country for Europe. He lived for much of his adult life in
France, though he referred to himself as a "commuter," returning to the
United States to organize actions and serve as an unofficial spokesman
for the burgeoning civil rights movement.
Baldwin considered himself a maverick -- answerable to nobody, white or
black, but himself. His criticism of discrimination against homosexuals,
and his openness about his own sexuality, estranged him from many civil
rights leaders. But Baldwin was never shy about carrying out his
self-proclaimed mission of "bearing witness to the truth." He died in
1987 at the age of 63.
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