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 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.
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