James Baldwin Biography and List of Works

American writer, noted for his sharp works on black-white relations and civil-rights struggle in the United States, which fuse autobiographical material with social concerns. Baldwin wrote six novels, three plays, a children's storybook, a book of short stories, and some 100 essays.

"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 sigh, No more water, the fire next time!"
(from The Fire Next Time, 1963)

Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, as the son of a domestic worker. Illegitimate, he never knew his own father and was brought up in great poverty. When he was three, his mother married a factory worker and storefront preacher. Baldwin adopted the surname from his stepfather, who died eventually in a mental hospital. At the age of 17 Baldwin left his home. After graduation from high school, he worked in several ill-paid jobs and started his literary apprenticeship. In the early 1940s Baldwin was in defence work in Belle Meade, New Jersey, and in 1943 he began writing full-time. The first version of his novel was rejected by publishers, but his early book reviews and essays, together with the help of Richard Wright, won him a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1948. However, Baldwin's uneasy relations with his stepfather, problems over sexual identity, suicide of a friend, and racism in his work in Newark drove him in 1948 to Paris and London. Baldwin lived in Europe ten years, mainly in Paris and Istanbul, and later spent long periods in New York. In 1957 he returned to the U.S. in order to become involved in the Southern school desegregation struggle.

Baldwin's first and one of his best-known novels, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, appeared in 1953. It was based on the author's experiences as a teenage preacher in a small church. Baldwin had found release from his poor surroundings through a Pentecostal church, in which he was converted at age fourteen and which he served as a minister for three years. Go Tell It on the Mountain depicted two days in the life of the Grimes family. The 14-years old John has a long series of conflicts with his father, whose lust and inability to communicate with his children have kept the Lord away from John. Before kneeling to the Lord he must kneel to his father, something he cannot do. In the end John is able to reject his father and he feels something die in him as well as come alive. Music, a supportive motif in the story, moves to the fore in JUST ABOVE MY HEAD (1979), Baldwin's longest novel.

Feelings of strangeness and helpless anger also troubled Baldwin in Europe. In an essay, 'Stranger in the Village' (1953) he depicts his visit in a tiny Swiss village. He realizes that the people of the village cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world. The children consider him an exotic rarity and shout Neger! Neger! in the streets without knowing his reaction under the smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine. Despite the saluts and bonsoirs, which Baldwin exchanged with people, he also sees in their eyes paranoiac malevolence - there is no European innocence, and the ideas which American beliefs are based on, originated form Europe. "For this village brings home to me this fact: that there was a day, and not really a very distant day, when Americans were scarcely Americans at all but discontented Europeans, facing a great unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a marketplace and seeing black men for the first time."

In Baldwin's second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM (1956), the theme was a man's struggle with his homosexuality. Major characters in the work are David, a young, bisexual American, Giovanni, his Italian lover, and Helga, his would-be wife. Other books include NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, which explores black-white relations in the U.S., and the collection of essays THE FIRE NEXT TIME, in which Baldwin appraises the Black Muslim (Nation of Islam) movement, and warns in the other essay that violence would result if white America does not change its attitudes toward black Americans. In ANOTHER COUNTRY (1962) the protagonist Rufus Brown, a jazz drummer, kills himself in despair after trying different permutations of love and sex. TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN'S BEEN GONE (1968) had again an artist at its center, and depicted the actor Leo Proudhammer's return to personal and political health through his love for the Malcolm X-like figure of Black Christopher.

"Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."
(from 'Stranger in the Village')

In his works from the 1970s, after the failure of the civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, Baldwin started bitterly to acknowledge that violence may be the only route to racial justice. Some optimism about peaceful progress would later return, with the changes he witnessed with the appointment and election of African Americans in the political arena. In the 1970s Baldwin suffered from writer's block. In 1974 appeared IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, a sentimental love story of a young sculptor, and his pregnant lover. Just Above My Head was a multisexual story of Arthur Montana, gospel singer, and his lover Jimmy and sister Julia, told by his brother Hall. EVIDENCE OF THE THINGS SEEN (1983), an account of the Atlanta murders, disappointed the critics.

In 1983 Baldwin became Five College Professor in the Afro-American Studies department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He spent his latter years in St. Paul de Vence on the Riviera, France, where he died of stomach cancer on November 30, 1987.

For further reading: The Furious Passage of James Baldwin by F. Eckman (1966); James Baldwin, ed. by Keneth Kinnamon (1974); James Baldwin, ed. by Therman O'Daniel (1975); James Baldwin, A Reference Guide by Fred L. Standley (1979); Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin by Horace A. Porter (1988); Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Strandley (1989); James Baldwin: The Legacy, ed. by Quincy Troupe (1989); James Baldwin: An Artist on Fire by W.J. Weatherby (1990); Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin by J. Campbell (1991); The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin by Jean-Francois Gounard (1993); Commitment As a Theme in African American Literature by R. Jothiprakash (1994); James Baldwin by Randall Kenan (1994); James Baldwin by Ted Gottfried (1997) - American writers in Paris in the 1950s: Richard Wright, Chester Himes- See also: Baldwin and Alex Haley.

See Baldwin as an essayist: Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. by Tracy Chevalier (1997) - Baldwin's essays were a weapon for change and appeared in some of the best-known publications, including New Leader, Freedomways, Commentary, Harper's, Mademoiselle, Partisan Reviwe, Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Review, Playboy, Esquire, and the New York Times . His reports on the civil rights activities of the 1960s provided a definitive analysis of its progress and made him special target of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation that alone accumulated a 1750-page file on him. The title essay in the collection NOTES OF A NATIVE SON (1955) used the of Baldwin's father, the birth of his youngest sister, and the Harlem riot of 1943 to develop the idea of the rage and hope growing up black in America.

NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, (1955)
GIOVANNI'S ROOM, (1956)
NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, (1962)
ANOTHER COUNTRY, (1962)
THE FIRE NEXT TIME, (1963)
BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE,, (1964)
GOING TO MEET THE MAN, (1965)
TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN'S BEEN GONE, (1968)
A RAP ON RACE, (1971)
IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, (1974)
JUST ABOVE MY HEAD, (1979)
THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN, (1985)
THE PRICE OF THE TICKET: COLLECTED NON-FICTION, (1948)
PERSPECTIVES: ANGLES ON AFRICAN ART, (1987)
CONVERSATIONS WITH JAMES BALDWIN, (1989)
EARLY NOVELS AND STORIES, (1998)
COLLECTED ESSAYS, (1998)