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James Baldwin
Photo courtesy of blackpast.org
James Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem, the upper Manhattan neighborhood in New York City, to a single mother. At the age of three, his mother, Emma Jones, married David Baldwin, a Baptist minister. Despite having a strained relationship with his father, Baldwin followed in the elder Baldwin’s footsteps, working as a preacher in a small revivalist church between the ages of 14 and 16. Later in life, Baldwin would write about and draw upon this time in his life in the first of his novels, the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), as well as in his play The Amen Corner (1965), about a woman evangelist.
Growing up, Baldwin developed a passion for reading and a gift for writing. Working on his high school’s magazine--alongside future award-winning photographer Richard Avedon--Baldwin began publishing poems, short stories, and plays. After graduating from high school in 1942, Baldwin put college plans on hold while he helped support his family, which had grown to include seven younger half-siblings. During this time, he took a series of illpaid jobs, including laying railroad tracks in New Jersey for the Army, while also engaging in self-study and a literary apprenticeship in Greenwich Village. In 1943, Baldwin lost his father the same day (July 29) his eighth sibling was born. He moved to Greenwich Village soon after.
Baldwin devoted himself to writing a novel, befriending writer Richard Wright, and eventually landing a fellowship in 1945 that covered his expenses. Baldwin’s essays and short stories began being published in national periodicals like The Nation, Partisan Review, and Commentary. Following the receipt of another fellowship, Baldwin moved to Paris, France, in 1948, where he lived for eight years. This also marked the beginning of Baldwin’s life as a “transatlantic commuter”--from 1969, Baldwin lived alternatively in the south of France, New York, and New England.
The shift to Paris in 1948 was also a move that Baldwin would later note gave him clarity as he looked back across the ocean and dealt with the real-
James Baldwin
ity that came with being the grandson of a slave. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, saw Baldwin examine his life growing up in Harlem, issues with his father, as well as his religion. Baldwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship the next year, leading to the publication of his second novel Giovanni’s Room in 1956, a groundbreaking novel for its complex depiction of homosexuality. Between these two novels, Baldwin also published a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955).
Baldwin, who was open about his homosexuality and relationships with both men and women, would often explore topics that were controversial for his time, including homosexuality and interracial relationships. In 1957, Baldwin returned to the United States and became active in the civil rights movement. Themes around race were central to works like his book of essays Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and his novel Another Country (1962).
In 1962, The New Yorker gave almost an entire issue of the magazine over to Baldwin’s article on the Black Muslim separatist movement and the civil rights movement. That article, “Letters from a Region of My Mind,” as well as another essay in The Progressive, “My Dungeon Shook,” were then combined and published in 1963 under the title The Fire Next Time. This book, intended to educate white Americans on what it meant to be Black, would go on to be considered one of the most influential books about race relations in the ‘60s.
The same year The Fire Next Time was published, Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine. By diving into his own life, Baldwin gave readers an unflinching look at the experience of Black Americans. Baldwin’s writing resulted in him becoming one of the leading voices in the civil rights movement.
During this time, Baldwin was also writing for the stage, beginning with The Amen Corner, which was first published in 1954 before opening on Broadway in 1965. A year earlier, his play Blues for Mister Charlie, which was loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till, also premiered on Broadway.
Baldwin continued writing until he died in 1987, though his later works did not achieve the popular or critical success of his earlier work. By the ‘70s, Baldwin had witnessed the assassinations of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. (Baldwin’s book Nothing Personal, a collaboration with Avedon published in 1964, was a tribute to Evers.) Critics point to Baldwin’s 1972 collection of essays, No Name in the Street, as a turning point in Baldwin’s work, where he took a more strident tone than his earlier works.
In the final years of his life, Baldwin was teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College, sharing his views and experiences as an observer of race and American culture. Baldwin died at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France, on Dec. 1, 1987.
Baldwin’s house in St. Paul De Vence as of 2009
