James Baldwin

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James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, playwright, and activist.

His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), decipher the intricacies of racial, sexual, and class divisions in Western societies, most notable in mid-century North America.

Some of Baldwin's papers are book-length, including The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976).

Remember This House, an unfinished manuscript, was enlarged and adapted for cinema as the Academy Award-nominated documentary film I Am Not Your Negro.

In 2018, As Beale Street Could Talk, one of his books, was turned into an Academy Award-winning drama. Baldwin's books and plays fictionalize fundamental personal concerns and dilemmas in the aftermath of a tumultuous socioeconomic and psychological strife, as well as gay and bisexual men, while still referring to internal obstacles to such individuals's seeking acceptance.

In Baldwin's second book, Giovanni's Room, published in 1956, well before the gay liberation movement.

Early life

On August 2, 1924, Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem Hospital in New York City. Baldwin was born out of wedlock. Jones never told Baldwin who his biological father was. According to Anna Malaika Tubbs' account of influential civil rights figures, some rumors implied that James Baldwin's father suffered from heroin use or died, but that in any case, she continued to care for her son as a single mother. Emma Jones, a descendent of Deal Island, Maryland, where she was born in 1903, was one of the many people escaping racial segregation in the South during the Great Migration. She was born in Harlem at 19 years old.

Jones married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher, in 1927. David Baldwin was born in Bunkie, Louisiana, and preached in New Orleans, but in 1919, he moved to Harlem. How David and Emma met is uncertain, but the two characters in James Baldwin's semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain were introduced by the man's sister, who is a friend of the woman. Emma Baldwin will have eight children with her husband (George, Barbara, Wilmer, Jr.) Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Paula were named for James' father and deceased half-brother) and Paula with her eldest James, who took their stepfather's last name. James rarely wrote or spoke about his mother. When he did, he made it clear that he admired and adored her, often by referring to her loving smile. 20 Baldwin visited Harlem several times in his youth, but the majority of them were to different addresses. Harlem was also a mixed-race neighborhood of the city in the early days of the Great Migration's arrival, tenements, and penury were present throughout the urban landscape.

David Baldwin was many years Emma's senior; he may have been born before Emancipation in 1863, but James did not know how old he was. Barbara Baldwin, David's mother, was born enslaved and lived in New York with the Baldwins until she died when James was seven years old. David and a sister named Barbara, whom James and others in the family affectionately named "Taunty" on her. Both David's father and James' paternal grandfather were enslaved. David had married earlier, begetting a daughter who was as old as Emma when the two were together, at least two sons' deaths, including David, and Sam, who was eight years old James' senior, saved James from drowning.

: 18–19

Throughout his life, James referred to his stepfather simply as his "father," but David Sr. and James revealed an extremely difficult relationship, with nearly all of them going back to physical confrontations. "They fought because [James] read books because he liked movies because he had white friends," Baldwin biographer David Adams Leeming wrote about James' "salvation." "His pledge to God was mixed with the fear that God would have revenge on them for him," another Baldwin biographer James Campbell wrote. David spent time in the 1920s and 1930s as a preacher. David Baldwin sprangled his frustration on his family, and the children became afraid of him, but tensions were not matched by the love lavished on them by their mother. David Baldwin became ill at the end of his life. In 1943, he was admitted to a mental hospital and died of tuberculosis on July 29 of that year, the same day Emma gave birth to their last child, Paula. James Baldwin, who was at his mother's request, had visited his dying stepfather the day before and had reached a posthumous agreement with him in his essay "Notes of a Native Son" in which he wrote, "he loved his children, who were black like him and threatened as him." David Baldwin's funeral took place on James' 19th birthday, about the same time as the Harlem riot broke out.

As the oldest child, James worked part-time from an early age to help support his family. He was not molded by his own family's challenges, but also by poverty and discrimination's findings, which he saw all around him. As he grew up, friends he sat next to in church would switch to heroin, violence, or prostitution. Baldwin never had a childhood," Tubbs found not in a reflection on his own life but rather on the Black experience in America. I did not have any human being identified with the 'Idy's.... I was born dead."

Baldwin wrote a little about life at school. Baldwin, a five-year-old boy, began attending Public School 24 on 128th Street in Harlem at the age of five. Gertrude E. Ayer, the school's first Black principal, acknowledged Baldwin's precocity and encouraged him in his research and writing pursuits, as did several of his teachers, who acknowledged his brilliant minds. James Baldwin inherited his writing ability from his mother, who's notes to school were highly admired by the teachers, and that her son also learned to write like an angel, albeit an avenging one. Baldwin had read some of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's books, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Cabin, and A Tale of Two Cities by fifth grade, not yet a teenager, sparking a lifelong fascination in Dickens' work. Baldwin wrote a song that received New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's adoration in a letter sent by La Guardia to Baldwin. Baldwin also received a prize for a short story that was published in a church newspaper. Baldwin's teachers recommended that he visit a public library on 135th Street in Harlem, a place that will become a sanctuary for Baldwin and where he would make a deathbed request for his papers and effects to be deposited.

It was at P.S. Baldwin said on September 24 that he encountered Orilla "Bill" Miller, a young white schoolteacher from the Midwest who Baldwin cited as part of the reason that he "never really hated white people." Miller brought Baldwin to see an all-Black version of Orson Welles' fight against Macbeth in Lafayette Theatre, which from which flowed a lifelong ambition to be a playwright. David was reluctant to let his stepson attend the theater because he regarded stage performances as sinful and was suspicious of Miller, but his wife persisted, reminding him of the importance of Baldwin's education. Miller later wrote the first play for Baldwin.

After the president of the United States, P.S. Baldwin, 24, graduated from Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem, Harlem. Baldwin had two major influences at Douglass Junior High. Herman W. "Bill" Porter, a Black Harvard graduate, was the first to mention him. Porter was the faculty advisor to the Douglass Pilot, where Baldwin would later serve as the editor. Baldwin took Baldwin to the library on 42nd Street to look at a piece that might become Baldwin's first published essay, "Harlem—Then and Now," which appeared in the Douglass Pilot's fall 1937 issue. Countee Cullen, the second of these influences from Douglass, was the Harlem Renaissance poet. Cullen studied French and served as a literary advisor in the English department. Baldwin later stated that he "loved" Cullen's poetry, and that he found the spark of his desire to live in France in Cullen's first glimpse of him. Baldwin graduated from Frederick Douglass Junior High in 1938.

Baldwin applied for and was accepted at De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, a predominantly white, predominantly Jewish academy, with a majority Jewish population. The fall of 1938 was the beginning of the school's decline. Baldwin spent time at De Witt Clinton, Maine, with Richard Avedon, who went on to become a well-known photographer, and Emile Capouya and Sol Stein, who would both become well-known publishers. Baldwin did interviews and editing at the magazine, as well as publishing a number of poems and other writings. Baldwin was a pupil at De Witt Clinton in 1941. His yearbook described his aspirations as "novelist-playwright." "Fame is the catalyst, not the bomber," Baldwin's yearbook said.

Baldwin sought refuge in faith during his high school years, fearing the fact that, unlike many of his peers, he was becoming more interested in males than in females. He first appeared on Lenox Avenue in 1937, but he continued to preach at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, following Bishop Rose Artemis Horn, who affectionately called Mother Horn. Baldwin, "Brother Baldwin," as Baldwin was called, was the first to enter Fireside's altar at 14. Baldwin "learned that he had power as a speaker and could do stuff with a crowd," says biographer Campbell, who preached it at Fireside Pentecostal, during his mostly extemporaneous sermons. In 1941, Baldwin preached his final sermon at Fireside Pentecostal. The church "was a mask for self-hatred and sourness," Baldwin wrote in the essay "Down at the Cross"; "salvation was not permitted at the cathedral door." With his stepfather's question, "You'd rather write than preach," he related that he had a rare chat with David Baldwin "in which they'd really talked to one another."

Baldwin left school in 1941 to earn enough money to help his family. He worked in New Jersey assisting in the construction of a US Army depot. Emile Capouya helped Baldwin find a job as a soldier in Belle Mead, New Jersey, in the middle of 1942. The two were born in Rocky Hill and then travelled to Belle Mead. Baldwin came to know the face of a prejudice that deeply irritated and angered him, as well as that he cited the partial explanation for his later migration out of America. Baldwin's fellow white laborers, who mainly came from the South, mocked him for his "uppity" behaviors and their lack of "respect." Baldwin's wit and irony assuaged the white Southerners he encountered in Belle Mead.

Baldwin went to the Balt restaurant in Princeton, where he was told that "colored boys" weren't served there, ending a long wait. On his last night in New Jersey, then, in another case also commemorated in "Notes of a Native Son," Baldwin and a friend went to a diner after a movie only to learn that Black people were not allowed to dine. He went to another restaurant in the hopes of being refused service once more. Baldwin hurled the nearest object at hand, missing her and shattering the mirror behind her, as denial of service came. Heavement and rage had risen, and heaved up to the surface. Baldwin and his companion were barely able to return.

Baldwin was torn between his desire to write and his desire to care for his family during those years. He worked in a number of menial jobs, afraid of becoming like his stepfather, who had been unable to properly care for his family. After returning to Harlem in June 1943 to live with his family after taking a meat-packing job. After falling asleep at the factory, Baldwin will lose the meat-packing job. He went from this odd job to another, becoming listless and unstable. Baldwin drank heavily and suffered with the first of his nervous breakdowns.

Baldwin's melancholy was shown by Beauford Delaney. Baldwin had visited Delaney, a modernist painter, in Greenwich Village in the year before he left De Witt Clinton and Capuoya's invitation. Delaney will be Baldwin's long-time friend and mentor, and he'll show Baldwin that a Black man could make his living off art. In addition, when World War II bore down on the United States the winter after Baldwin left De Witt Clinton, the Harlem that Baldwin recognized as an atrophy — no longer the bastion of a Renaissance — Baldwin's Harlem became more deprived, and Baldwin considered his chances there bleak. Baldwin was moved to Greenwich Village, where Beauford Delaney lived and a place by which he had been fascinated since at least fifteen years.

Baldwin lived in several Greenwich Village locations, first with Delaney and later with a slew of other acquaintances. He worked at the Calypso Restaurant, an unsegregated eatery famous for the parade of popular Black people who dined there. Baldwin worked at Calypso under Trinidadian restauranteur Connie Williams, whom Delaney introduced him to. Baldwin, who was at Calypso, continued to explore his sexuality, met Capouya and another acquaintance, as well as a frequent Calypso visitor Stan Weir. In addition, he had several one-night stands with various men and several intimate affairs with women. Eugene Worth, ostensibly straight Black man, was Baldwin's major love during his time in the village. Worth introduced Baldwin to the Young People's Socialist League, and Baldwin became a Trotskyist for a brief period. Baldwin never expressed his desire for Worth, and Worth died by suicide after falling from the George Washington Bridge in 1946. Baldwin was introduced to Marlon Brando, whom he had also attracted to, at a theater class in The New School in 1944. The two became close friends quickly after the Civil Rights Movement and long after. Baldwin began The Generation with Claire Burch, who was married to Brad Burch, Baldwin's classmate from De Witt Clinton, in 1945. Baldwin's Burches association ended in the 1950s, but he was revived near the end of his life.

Baldwin met Richard Wright, who had written Native Son several years earlier, at the end of 1944. The initial meeting was based on a journey that convinced Wright of the authenticity of an early manuscript for what would become Go Tell It On The Mountain, which was dubbed "Crying Holy" in the following version. Wright loved the book and urged his editors to investigate Baldwin's work, but Harper & Brothers refused to pay the bill with no book to show for the pain. Harper also decided not to publish the book at all. Nevertheless, Baldwin continued to write letters to Wright in the years and would reunite with Wright in Paris in 1948, but their friendship soon after the Paris reunion began to be rocky.

Baldwin maintained a number of links in the liberal New York literary establishment, chiefly through Worth: Sol Levitas at The Nation, Elliot Cohen, and Robert Warshow at Commentary, and Partisan Review's Philip Rahv. Baldwin wrote several articles for The New Leader, but it was published in The Nation for the first time in 1947 as part of Maxim Gorki's Best Short Stories. Only one of Baldwin's reviews from this period turned it into his later essay collection The Price of the Ticket: a satisfaction with Ross Lockridge's Raintree Countree, which Baldwin wrote for The New Leader. Baldwin's first book, "The Harlem Ghetto," was released a year later in Commentary and explored anti-Semitism among Black Americans. Harlem was a parody of white America, with white American anti-Semitism included. Jews were also the most prominent group of white people in Harlem, so Jews became a kind of synecdoche for all the fact that the Black people in Harlem were afraid of white people. Baldwin's second essay in The New Leader, riding a small wave of excitement over "Harlem Ghetto": in "Journey to Atlanta," Baldwin used his diary to unleash a slew of irony and scorn on the South, white radicals, and ideology itself. This essay, as well as others, was well received.

Baldwin attempted to write another book, Ignorant Armies, with a focus on a scandalous assassination, but no final product was delivered and his attempts toward a novel remained unsatisfied. Baldwin lived in Woodstock, New York, for two months out of summer 1948. In the October 1948 issue of Commentary, he wrote about a 20-something Black man who is evicted from his apartment, making the house a metaphor for white society.

Source

Career

Disillusioned by American mistreatment of Black people, as well as the desire to see himself and his writing outside of an African-American setting, he left the US at the age of 24 to settle in Paris. Baldwin didn't want to be seen as "merely a Negro" or "more specifically a Negro." He also wanted to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and escape the hopelessness that many young African-American men succumb to in New York.

Baldwin attempted Unto the Dying Lamb with a photographer friend named Theodore Pelatowski, who Baldwin encountered through Richard Avedon in 1948. The book was intended to be both a bibliography of churches and a study of faith in Harlem, but it was never finished. Baldwin, on the other hand, was granted the possibility of consummating a dream he had for many years running: moving to France. Baldwin said he bid farewell to his mother and younger siblings with 40 dollars to his name, but he moved from New York to Paris on November 11, 1948, having paid the majority of the scholarship funds to his mother, which he did. Baldwin will give various reasons for leaving America, including sex, Calvinism, a strong fear of turning inward, but most importantly, his ethnicity: the feature of his existence that had exposed him to a long line of humiliations. He aspired for a more peaceful life in Paris.

Baldwin was immediately involved in the Left Bank's cultural radicalism in Paris. He began to publish his work in literary anthologies, particularly Zero, which was edited by his colleague Themistocles Hoetis and in which Richard Wright had already published essays.

Baldwin spent nine years in Paris, mainly in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with occasional trips to Switzerland, Spain, and back to the United States. Baldwin's stay in Paris was itinerant: he stayed with various associates around the city and in various hotels. Hôtel Verneuil, a hotel in Saint-Germain that had collected a motley crew of struggling expatriates, mainly writers, was the most notable of these lodgings. Several friendships were forged in Verneuil's turbulent times. During his stay in Paris, Baldwin was also extremely ill, with only momentary relief from his illness. Baldwin, among other things, spent time in Saint-Germain with Otto Friedrich, Mason Hoffenberg, Asa Benveniste, Themistocles Hoetis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Max Ernst, Truman Capote, and Stephen Spender. At the time of their first meeting, Baldwin met Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss boy, seventeen years old at the time, who came to France in search of excitement. Happersberger became Baldwin's girlfriend, especially in Baldwin's first two years in France, and Baldwin's near-obsession a few years after. Baldwin and Happersberger will be friends for the next thirty-nine years. Baldwin, although his time in Paris was not straightforward, managed to escape the aspects of American life that most terrified him, particularly the "strongly indignities of bigotry," according to biographer James Campbell. "Baldwin seemed at ease in his Paris life," Baldwin's companion and biographer David Leeming writes; Jimmy Baldwin, the aesthete and lover, reveled in the Saint-Germain atmosphere.

Baldwin wrote several notable works in Paris before Go Tell It On The Mountain's publication. In Paris, "The Negro in Paris," the first issue of The Reporter, explored Baldwin's notion of an incompatibility between Black Americans and Black Africans, as Black Americans experienced a "deep alienation from oneself and one's people" that was largely unknown to Parisian Africans. He also wrote "The Innocence of Innocence," which traces the violence against homosexuals in American life back to America's protracted adolescence as a nation. "Too Little, Too Late," an essay on Black American literature, and "The Death of the Prophet," a short story that arose from Baldwin's earlier writings on Go Tell It on The Mountain, he published "Too Little, Too Late." Baldwin assigns his bouts of depression to his inability to answer the concerns of filial attachment that arose from Baldwin's friendship with his stepfather in the latter film. Baldwin was arrested and jailed for receiving stolen property in December 1949 after an American friend gave him bedsheets that the friend had stolen from another Paris hotel. Baldwin's essay "Equal in Paris," which was later released in Commentary in 1950, when the charges were dismissed several days later, to the chagrine of the courtroom. He expressed surprise and bewilderment at how he was no longer a "despised black man" but rather an American, no different than his white American friend who took the sheet and with whom he had been detained.

Baldwin wrote two of his three scathing critiques of Richard Wright, "Everybody's Prospetta" in 1949 and "Many Thousands Gone" in 1951. Baldwin's review of Wright is a continuation of his disapproval of protest literature. Baldwin, a biographer, was critical of protest literature because it is "concerned with theories and the categorization of human beings," and although brilliant the theories or concrete the categorizations are inaccurate, they die because they deny life." According to Baldwin, "only within this web of ambiguity, contradiction, hunger, danger, and darkness will we find ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves." Baldwin used Wright's Native Son and Stowe's Cabin, both early Baldwin's favorites, as illustrative examples of the resistance novel's subject. The treatment of Wright's Bigger Thomas by socially earnest white people near the end of Native Son was, for Baldwin, emblematic of white America's presumption that for Black people "to be truly human and acceptable, [they] must first become like us." "The Negro in America can only consent to the obliteration of his own identity," the Negro's assumption was first understood. Baldwin attempted to lay out what would be a theme in his writing: that white supremacy against Black Americans was debuffed by self-hatred and self-denial—"One might say that the Negro in America does not exist in the [white] haze. [...] Our dehumanization of the Negro is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves." Baldwin's friendship with Wright was tense but cordial after the papers, but Baldwin later came to regard Wright as a mentor. In addition, Baldwin received the accolade "the most promising young Negro writer since Richard Wright" on "Everybody's Prosecutors."

Baldwin and Happersberger's family travelled to Loèches-les-Bains, Switzerland, where Happersberger's family owned a small chateau in the winter of 1951. By the time of his first trip, Happersberger had already entered a heterosexual relationship, but he was concerned for his friend Baldwin, who had invited Baldwin to the Swiss village. Baldwin's time in the village gave birth to his essay "Stranger in the Village," which was released in Harper's Magazine in October 1953. Baldwin's essay outlined some intentional mistreatment and offputting experiences with Swiss villagers who had a racial innocence that few Americans could attest to. Baldwin explored how the bitter past of Black and white Americans had created an intricate web of links that transformed both races: "No road whatever will bring Americans back to the simplicity of this European village, where white men still have the privilege of looking at me as a stranger."

According to biographer David Leeming, Beauford Delaney's arrival in France in 1953 marked "the most significant personal event in Baldwin's life." Baldwin's circle of friends grew close to dancer Bernard Hassell's performance at Gordon Heath's club in Paris; for the first time in these years, she attended Maya Angelou's performances; and occasionally met with composer Richard Gibson and Chester Himes, composer Howard Swanson, and even Richard Wright. Baldwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954 while at the MacDowell writer's colony in New Hampshire to assist with the writing of a new book. Baldwin produced the three-act play The Amen Corner, which features the preacher Sister Margaret, a fictionalized Mother Horn from Baldwin's time in Fireside Pentecostal, struggling with a difficult family history and alienation from her and her relatives as a result of her religious zeal. Baldwin spent many weeks in Washington, D.C., and particularly near Howard University, where he worked with Owen Dodson on The Amen Corner's debut in October 1955, returning to Paris in October 1955.

Baldwin committed himself to returning to the United States in 1957, so he set out in early 1956 to enjoy what would be his last year in France. He became friends with Norman and Adele Mailer, who was given a grant by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and Giovanni's Room was supposed to be published. Baldwin, on the other hand, fell deeper into an emotional wreckage. Baldwin's first serious relationship since Happersberger began in 1956 after a reportedly bad start with a Black musician named Arnold, Baldwin's first serious friendship since Happersberger—Baldwin overdosed on sleeping pills in a suicide attempt. He regretted the attempt almost immediately and called a friend who had him regurgitate the medications before the doctor arrived. Baldwin went on to attend the Congres of Black Writers and Artists in September 1956, a conference that he found disappointing in terms of its perverse reliance on European themes but also purporting to extol African originality.

Baldwin wrote the book Go Tell It on the Mountains, which was sent by French author Alfred A. Knopf on February 26, 1952, but Knopf expressed interest in the book several months later. Baldwin sailed back to Knopf in April, where Themistocles Hoetis and Dizzy Gillespie were coincidentally voyaging—his discussions with both on the ship were extensive. Baldwin spent the next three months with his family, whom he hadn't seen in almost three years since arriving in New York. Baldwin grew close to his younger brother, David Jr., and served as the best man at David's wedding on June 27. Baldwin has also agreed to rewrite portions of Go Tell It on the Mountain in exchange for a $250 deposit ($2,551 today) and a larger $750 ($7,653 today) when the final manuscript was completed. Baldwin was soon to have his first published novel after Knopf accepted the change in July. Baldwin also published excerpts of the book in two journals: one excerpt was published in American Mercury as "Exodus" in American Mercury and the other as "Roy's Wound" in New World Writing. Baldwin returned to Europe on August 28 and Go Tell It on the Mountain was released in May 1953.

Go Tell It on the Mountain was the result of Baldwin's years of study and discovery since his first attempt at a book in 1938. Baldwin thought inherent to such books as "no tradition, no field of ethics, no evidence of ritual or intercourse," Baldwin wrote in Go Tell It on the Mountain to emphasize that the Negro's absence was not due to a lack of a cohesive and difficult approach to making this history fully understood." Baldwin's work as a Young Man and James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" describes "experience and the uncreated conscience of my race." Baldwin drew parallels between Joyce's flight from Ireland and his own run from Harlem, and Harlem's tome in 1950, but it would be the Black American "uncreated conscience" at the center of the project, according to Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain.

The novel is a bildungsroman that delves into protagonist John Grimes' onward struggle, the illegitimate son of Elizabeth Grimes,'s who claims his own soul as it lays on the "threshing floor" in reference to another John, the Baptist born of another Elizabeth. Baldwin's struggle is a representation of his own struggle between losing the past and culture that made him, ugly as it is, and plunging deeper into the past to the bottom of his people's sorrows before he can shuffle off his psychic chains, "climb the ridge," and free himself. The novel's family members and the bulk of the characters are carried north in the winds of the Great Migration in search of the American Dream, and they are all stifled. Because of racial insecurity, Florence, Elizabeth, and Gabriel are deprived of love's reach. They can not muster the kind of self-respect that love requires. Elizabeth's companion, Richard, is led to suicide by racism; Richard will not be the last Baldwin character to die in the same way. Frank, Florence's lover, is shattered by the searing self-hatred of his own Blackness. Gabriel's violence of the women in his life follows him as a result of his culture's emasculation of him, with mealy-mouthed religiosity only a circumstantial cover.

Throughout Go Tell It on the Mountain, the phrase "in my father's house" and several related variants appear, as well as a novel's title. The house is a metaphor on several levels: for his own family's apartment in Harlem, for Harlem as a whole, as well as the "deep heart's center." Through a conversion experience, John's move from the agony that ruled in his father's house, as well as the historical sources of his ancestors' privations, came about.

"Who are these?

"They were the condemned and disregarded, the wretched and wretched, the dewled and slaughter; the earth's offscouring; and they would swallow up their soul," John cries out as he steps down from his threshing floor: "They were the victims and outraged. John wants to get out of the threshing floor, but "Awe" filled him, and "a smile" filled him. Elisha, the woman of love who had followed him through his life, and whose body filled John with "a wild delight," is John's midwife. "Burning the chains and fetters," Baldwin's philosophy would develop, "the self-hatred and other consequences of historical bigotry could only come from love."

Sol Stein, Baldwin's high school friend who prompted Baldwin to write an essay collection focusing on his work to date. Baldwin was hesitant to publish his memoirs because he was "too young to publish my memoirs." Stein continued to sing of his friend Baldwin, and Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955. Baldwin's book included practically every major theme that would continue to exist throughout Baldwin's work: finding a birthright ("the conundrum of every American"); accepting an inheritance ("the conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American"); and saying goodbye to all the lives; love's ferociousness; All of the essays in Notes were published between 1948 and 1955 in Commentary, The New Leader, Partisan Review, The Reporter, and Harper's Magazine. As all of Baldwin's work does, the essays are based on autobiographical detail to convey Baldwin's arguments. Baldwin's first meeting with many white Americans and becoming their first point of reference for his writing: "Why don't you write more essays like those in Notes of a Native Son?" The collection's title refers to both Richard Wright's Native Son and the writings of Henry James' Notes of a Son and Brother, one of Baldwin's most popular writers.

Notes on a Native Son is divided into three parts: the first part explores Black identity as artist and human; the second part explores Black life in America, including what is often considered Baldwin's best essay, "Notes of a Native Son"; the last part explores American culture from outside of the United States; "Everybody's Prosecutors" and "Many Thousands Gone" are among Carmen Jones' "The Dark Is Light Enough," a 1955 study of Carmen Jones, where Baldwin extols the sight of an all-Black cast on the silver screen and laments the film's myths of Black sexuality. "The Harlem Ghetto" and "Journey to Atlanta" are prefaces to "Notes of a Native Son" in Part Two. Baldwin's book "Notes of a Native Son" comes to terms with his racial and filial roots. "Equal in Paris," "Stranger in the Village," "Encounter on the Seine," and "A Question of Identity" are among Parts of Part Three. Part Three of Baldwin's corpus is the part that most closely mimics Henry James' methods: hewing out of one's distance and detachment from the homeland gives one a realistic picture of what it means to be American.

Baldwin takes the view of white Americans throughout Notes, even though Baldwin is not speaking in first-person. "What it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by the myths we believe about him," Baldwin writes in "The Harlem Ghetto." Reviewers were outraged by this: Langston Hughes, a New York Times Book Reviewer, said that "Baldwin's views are half American, half Afro-American, and incompletely fused." Some people were dissatisfied by white audiences' handholding, which Baldwin himself would criticize in later works. Nevertheless, Baldwin nevertheless wanted to break away from the rigid boundaries of protest literature, and he found adopting a white point-of-view as a helpful way to do so.

Baldwin received word from Dial Press that Giovanni's Room had been approved for publication just weeks after returning from Paris. Baldwin sent the final manuscript for the book to his editor, James Silberman, on April 8, 1956, and the book was published that fall. In the book, the protagonist David is in Paris, while his fiancé Hella is in Spain. At the bar that Guillaume owns, David meets the titular Giovanni; the two become more close, and David finally enters Giovanni's room. David is befuddled by his intense feelings for Giovanni and has sex with a woman in the spur of the moment to reaffirm his sexuality. Giovanni continues to prostitute himself, and eventually commits a murder for which he has been convicted. David's tale is one of love's hesslexia: he can't "face love when he finds it," writes biographer James Campbell. The novel follows a traditional plot: the confrontation between puritanism's restraints and the urge for adventure, emphasizing the loss of innocence that results. An event that occurred between 1943 and 1944 is used to inform the novel's plot. Lucien Carr killed David Kammerer, an older, homosexual man who made sexual advances on Carr. Kammerrer made a pass at Carr, causing Carr to stab Kammerer and dump Kammerer's body into the river while the two were walking along the banks of the Hudson River. Giovanni's Room's reviews were encouraging, to Baldwin's surprise, and his family did not comment on the subject.

Even from Paris, Baldwin heard the echoes of a growing Civil Rights Movement in his homeland: the United States Supreme Court ordered schools to desegregate "with all deliberate speed"; in August, Emmett Till's murder and subsequent acquittal of his killers would burn in Baldwin's mind; and, in September, Autherine Lucy was admitted to the University of Alabama before being expelled as whites revolted. Baldwin, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly drained by the knowledge that he was wasting time in Paris. Baldwin started planning a return to the United States in the hopes of writing a book about Booker T. Washington, which he later identified as Talking at the Gates. Baldwin was also hired to write a report about Daniel Guérin's Negroes, a newspaper published in the United States by J. C. Furnas, as well as articles on William Faulkner and American racism for Partisan Review.

"The Crusade of Indignation" was the first project that was published in July 1956. Baldwin claims that the portrait of Black life in Uncle Tom's Cabin "has set the tone for American whites' treatment toward Negroes for the past ten years," and that, given the novel's success, a simplistic portrayal of Black Americans has failed to convey the full range of Black humanity. The second project developed into an essay titled "William Faulkner and Desegregation." "Even if it meant going out into the streets and shooting Negroes," Faulkner's March 1956 remark in an interview that he was inspired by Faulkner's comment that he was bound to enlist himself with his fellow white Mississippians in a war against desegregation. Baldwin, Faulkner, embodied "go slow" mentality in the Southerner's strange quandary: the South "clings to two purely antithetical crees, two myths, two legends, two centuries; on the other hand, he pledges to a society that has yet to wake up to the need for naked and brutal oppression. Faulkner asks for more time, but "the date [...] does not exist." [...] There has never been a time in history where we can work out our salvation.

Baldwin set out to finish Another Country before returning to New York in the fall of 1957, but progress on the book led him to a decision to return to the United States sooner. Beauford Delaney was especially tense about Baldwin's resignation. Delaney had started to drink a lot and was in the early stages of mental decline, and was concerned about hearing voices. Nevertheless, Baldwin, after a brief visit to Édith Piaf, set sail for New York in July 1957.

Baldwin spent the majority of his life in France. He also spent time in Switzerland and Turkey. Baldwin settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France's south of France, in an old Provençal house beneath the ramparts of the historic village. His house was always open to his family, who came to visit him on trips to the French Riviera. Beauford Delaney, an American painter, made Baldwin's house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence his second home, often setting up his easel in the garden. Baldwin's portraits were among Delaney's many colorful portraits. At this time, Fred Nall Hollis had a befriend with Baldwin. Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were among the regular house guests.

Many of Baldwin's musicians came to perform at the Jazz à Juan and Nice Jazz Festivals. Nina Simone, Josephine Baker (whose sister lived in Nice), Miles Davis, and Ray Charles were among them.

In his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote:

Baldwin learned to speak French fluently and developed friendships with French actor Yves Montand and French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, who translated Baldwin's poem The Amen Corner into French.

Baldwin spent years in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, which culminated in years of hard work. He spent his days on the front of his robust typewriter and answering the brisk mail he received from around the world. Several of his last writings in his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, including Just Above My Head in 1979 and Evidence of Things Not Seen in 1985, were among his many. Baldwin wrote his famous "Open Letter to My Sister," Angela Y. Davis, in November 1970, in his Saint-Paul-de-Vence home.

Following Baldwin's death in 1987, a court contest erupted over his house's rights. Baldwin was attempting to buy his house from his landlady, Mlle. Jeanne Faure. Baldwin did not have complete ownership of the house at the time of his death, although it was still Mlle. It's infiaure's intention that the house be retained by the family. "Chez Baldwin's home, which has been described as the epicenter of scholarly inquiry and political activism, has been at the forefront of scholarly inquiry and artistic and political activism. "Chez Baldwin" at the National Museum of African American History and Culture uses his historic French home as a lens to explore his life and culture. Magdalena J. Zaborowska's book, Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France, discusses issues of politics, race, queerness, and domesticity in France.

Several attempts were launched over the years to save the house and turn it into an artist residency. No one in Baldwin had the Baldwin estate's endorsement. Le Monde's opinion piece on Thomas Chatterton Williams, a French Black American expatriate writer, prompted a group of activists to convene in Paris in February 2016. In June 2016, American writer and feminist Shannon Cain squatted at the house for ten days in an act of political and artistic resistance. Les Amis de la Maison Baldwin, a French company whose initial aim was to purchase the house by launching a capital campaign sponsored by the US philanthropic industry, fell out of this effort. Without the Baldwin Estate's help, this campaign was fruitless. By Joseph Le Chapelain, the mayor of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, whose claim that "nobody's ever heard of James Baldwin" related to that of Henri Chambon, the owner of the company that razed his house, was rejected attempts to involve the French government in the preservation of the property. In 2019, construction was completed on the apartment complex that now stands where Chez Baldwin once stood.

In 1947, Baldwin's first published book, a biography of writer Maxim Gorky, appeared in The Nation. He continued to publish in the journal at various points in his career and was serving on the editorial board at his death in 1987.

Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin's first book, was released in 1953. It was a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman. He began writing it when he was seventeen and first published it in Paris. Notes of a Native Son, his first collection of essays, was published two years later. He continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, releasing poetry and plays as well as the literature and essays for which he was known.

When it first appeared in 1956, Baldwin's Room, the author's second book, caused a lot of controversy when it was first published. Baldwin denied labels with the unveiling of this work. Despite the reading public's apprehensions that he would publish works dealing with African American experiences, Giovanni's Room is primarily about white characters.

Both Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train (1968), Baldwin's third and fourth books, are sprawling, experimental works dealing with Black and white characters, as well as heterosexual, gay, and bisexual characters.

Baldwin's long essay "Down at the Cross" (also known as The Fire Next Time after the title of the 1963 book in which it was published) displayed the same tumultuous dissatisfaction in novel form. The essay was first published in two huge newspapers The New Yorker and landed Baldwin on the front page of Time magazine in 1963, when he was touring the South researching the restive Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin, a well-known civil rights spokesperson and a celebrity known for advocating the cause of Black Americans around the time of its publication of The Fire Next Time. He appeared on television and delivered addresses on college campuses. The essay explored Christianity's tense connection with the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. Several Black nationalists chastised Baldwin for his conciliatory behavior after its publication. They asked whether his message of love and knowledge would do anything to change race relations in America. Whites were consumed by the book, asking: What do Black Americans really want? Baldwin's essays never stopped expressing the indignation and annoyance felt by authentic-life Black Americans with more clarity and style than any other writer of his time.

No Name in the Street (1972), Baldwin's next book-length essay, also addressed his own experience in the 1970s, focusing on three of his closest friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Baldwin's writings from the 1970s and 1980s were mostly ignored by analysts, but they have gained increasing attention in recent years. Several of his essays and interviews of the 1980s explore homosexuality and homophobia with fervor and forthrightness. Baldwin's ferocious critique of him in Soul on Ice and elsewhere, as well as Baldwin's return to southern France contributed to the belief by critics that he was not in touch with his readership. He had been the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and he was a leading figure in the burgeoning gay rights movement. If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979), two of his 1970 books, put a strong emphasis on the importance of Black American families. Jimmy's Blues (1983), as well as another book-length essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), an extended reflection on race inspired by the 1979-191 Atlanta murders.

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Honors and awards

• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1954.
• Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award
• Foreign Drama Critics Award
• George Polk Memorial Award, 1963
• MacDowell fellowships: 1954, 1958, 1960
• Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur, 1986