James Baldwin
James Baldwin (1924-1987) somehow managed to live most of his adult life in France (from age 24 until his death at 63) and yet became an essential voice of the 20th Century American experience. He seemed to master the living of something — playwriting, preaching, short story writing, novel writing, public speaking — and then to perfect it from a distance of the living. His level gaze, his deliberation of speech, his precise articulation all bestowed an air of authority and of wisdom that a passionate age had in short supply. His prose style is striking in its smooth power, its fluidity, and its threat or promise of an ambush of revelation. He was self-taught, never went to university, and found his deep well of influence in his reading.
He was born in Harlem, New York City. He never knew his father, but in an ambivalent way his step-father, a Baptist preacher, was a profound influence, as was his strong mother. In middle school he had the good fortune of having Harlem Renaissance novelist and poet Countee Cullen as a mentor. When he was attending the Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx he became a junior minister/boy preacher at the Fireside Pentacostal Assembly. He wrote and wrote and wrote during his teen years and read ten or a hundred times beyond what he wrote.
Too young for WWII, he left for France when he was 24 and, despite many trips back to the US and active involvement in the great social issues of the day, he essentially lived the expatriate life. His roll of friends is staggering: Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Nina Simone, Josephine Baker, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Yves Montand, and Marguerite Yourcenar, among many others. He was a magnet, an engine for mid-century cultural life across borders around the world. He died of stomach cancer much, much too young.
James Baldwin: Later Novels (Library of America)
James Baldwin: Later Novels (Library of America)
With such landmark novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, and the essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin established himself as the indispensable literary voice of the Civil Rights era, a figure whose prophetic exploration of the racial and sexual fissures in American society challenged and electrified American readers. But by the late 1960s and ’70s many regarded Baldwin as being out of sync with the political and social currents transforming America: too integrationist for the champions of “Black Power” and others on the Left, yet too “pessimistic” for many white readers. As a result his final three novels—Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979)—have yet to receive the consideration given his earlier fiction. Now, these late novels, carefully annotated to clarify Baldwin’s many musical and other cultural references, are collected for the first time in a single-volume edition, a companion volume to The Library of America’s Early Novels and Stories.
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, inspired in part by Baldwin’s unhappy experience collaborating with the Actors Studio for the staging of one of his plays, begins with the sudden heart attack of its thirty-nine-year-old protagonist, the celebrated actor Leo Proudhammer, whose rise to fame from impoverished beginnings in Harlem is recounted as he recuperates. Although wholly fictional, it is a profoundly personal work, as Proudhammer’s conflicted assessment of his life and career mirror Baldwin’s own struggles in the mid-1960s. If Beale Street Could Talk, the only Baldwin novel narrated by a woman, is a love story in which a young couple must weather a false accusation of rape and the predatory misconduct of the police. Baldwin’s final novel, the sprawling Just Above My Head, follows the troubled life and tumultuous times of world-famous gospel singer Arthur Montana; here Baldwin’s continued critical engagement with the African American church and with black music, begun decades earlier with Go Tell It on the Mountain, brings his career full circle.