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James Baldwin was a U.S. novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist. His work focused on the inequality between different groups of people in the United States. He is best known for writing about the struggles of African Americans.
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An American novelist, essayist, and playwright, James...
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- Early Life
- Career
- Death
- Social and Political Activism
- Inspiration and Relationships
- Honors and Awards
- Works
- Media Appearances
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Birth and family
Baldwin was born as James Arthur Jones to Emma Berdis Jones on August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital in New York City. Baldwin was born out of wedlock. Jones never revealed to Baldwin who his biological father was. Jones undertook to care for her son as a single mother. A native of Deal Island, Maryland, where she was born in 1903, Emma Jones was one of the many who fled racial segregation in the South during the Great Migration. She arrived in Harlemat 19 years old. In 1927, Jones married David...
Education and preaching
Baldwin wrote comparatively little about events at school. At five years old, Baldwin began school at Public School 24 on 128th Street in Harlem. The principal of the school was Gertrude E. Ayer, the first Black principal in the city, who recognized Baldwin's precocity and encouraged him in his research and writing pursuits, as did some of his teachers, who recognized he had a brilliant mind. Ayer stated that James Baldwin got his writing talent from his mother, whose notes to school were gre...
Later years in New York
Baldwin left school in 1941 to earn money to help support his family. He secured a job helping to build a United States Army depot in New Jersey. In the middle of 1942 Emile Capouya helped Baldwin get a job laying tracks for the military in Belle Mead, New Jersey. The two lived in Rocky Hill and commuted to Belle Mead. In Belle Mead, Baldwin came to know the face of a prejudice that deeply frustrated and angered him and that he named the partial cause of his later emigration out of America. B...
Life in Paris
Disillusioned by American prejudice against Black people, as well as wanting to see himself and his writing outside of an African-American context, he left the United States at the age of 24 to settle in Paris. In Paris, Baldwin was soon involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank. He started to publish his work in literary anthologies, notably Zero which was edited by his friend Themistocles Hoetis and which had already published essays by Richard Wright. Baldwin spent nine years li...
1950s
In 1953, Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman was published. He began writing it when he was only seventeen and first published it in Paris. His first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Sonappeared two years later. He continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known. Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, caused great controversy whe...
Return to New York
Even from Paris, Baldwin heard the whispers of a rising Civil Rights Movement in his homeland: in May 1954, the United States Supreme Court ordered schools to desegregate "with all deliberate speed"; in August 1955 the racist murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi would burn in Baldwin's mind until he wrote Blues for Mister Charlie; in December Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus; and in February 1956 Autherine Lucy was admitted to the University...
On December 1, 1987, Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. He was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City. Fred Nall Hollis took care of Baldwin on his deathbed. Nall had been friends with Baldwin from the early 1970s when Baldwin would buy him drinks at the Café de Flore. Nall recalled talking t...
Baldwin returned to the United States in the summer of 1957 while the civil rights legislation of that year was being debated in Congress. He had been powerfully moved by the image of a young girl, Dorothy Counts, braving a mob in an attempt to desegregate schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv had suggested he...
A great influence on Baldwin was the painter Beauford Delaney. Later support came from Richard Wright, whom Baldwin called "the greatest black writer in the world". Wright and Baldwin became friends, and Wright helped Baldwin secure the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award. Baldwin's essay "Notes of a Native Son" and his collection Notes of a Native Son ...
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1954.Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust AwardForeign Drama Critics AwardGeorge Polk Memorial Award, 1963Novels
1. 1953. Go Tell It on the Mountain(semi-autobiographical) 2. 1956. Giovanni's Room 3. 1962. Another Country 4. 1968. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone 5. 1974. If Beale Street Could Talk 6. 1979. Just Above My Head
Essays and short stories
Many essays and short stories by Baldwin were published for the first time as part of collections (e.g. Notes of a Native Son). Others, however, were published individually at first and later included with Baldwin's compilation books. Some essays and stories of Baldwin's that were originally released on their own include: 1. 1949. "Everybody's Protest Novel". Partisan Review(June issue) 2. 1953. "Stranger in the Village". Harper's Magazine. 3. 1954. "Gide as Husband and Homosexual". The New L...
Plays and audio
1. 1954 The Amen Corner (play) 2. 1964. Blues for Mister Charlie(play) 3. 1990. A Lover's Question(album). Les Disques Du Crépuscule – TWI 928–2.
1963-06-24. "A Conversation With James Baldwin", is a television interview recorded by WGBH following the Baldwin–Kennedy meeting.1963-02-04. Take This Hammeris a television documentary made with Richard O. Moore on KQED about Blacks in San Francisco in the late 1950s.1965-06-14. "Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley", recorded by the BBCis a one-hour television special program featuring a debate between Baldwin and leading American conservative William F. Buckley, Jr.,...1971. Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris. Documentary. Directed by Terence Dixon.List of American novelistsAn American novelist, essayist, and playwright, James Baldwin wrote with eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America. His main message was that blacks deserve to be treated like humans and that the civil rights problem derives from the insecurity of the white man, who needs a “Negro” to whom he can feel superior.
Learn about James Baldwin, a prominent African American writer and activist who lived in Paris for most of his life. Explore his early years in Harlem, his mentors, his travels, his works, and his legacy.
James Arthur Baldwin (né Jones; August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an African American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. [1]
Novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist James Baldwin, 1975.
Aug 16, 2023 · Who Was James Baldwin? Writer and playwright James Baldwin published the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain , receiving acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality and humanity.
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