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.
Nothing Personal
Nothing Personal
PUBLICATION DAY IS MAY 6, 2021.
James Baldwin’s critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and police brutality to a new generation of readers.
Available for the first time in a stand-alone edition, Nothing Personal is Baldwin’s deep probe into the American condition. Considering the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020—which were met with tear gas and rubber bullets the same year white supremacists entered the US Capitol with little resistance, openly toting flags of the Confederacy—Baldwin’s documentation of his own troubled times cuts to the core of where we find ourselves today.
Baldwin’s thoughts move through an interconnected range of questions, from America’s fixation on eternal youth, to its refusal to recognize the past, its addiction to consumerism, and the lovelessness that fuels it in its cities and popular culture. He recounts his own encounter with police in a scene disturbingly similar to those we see today documented with ever increasing immediacy. This edition also includes a new foreword from interdisciplinary scholar Imani Perry and an afterword from noted Baldwin scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Both explore and situate the essay within the broader context of Baldwin’s work, the Movement for Black Lives, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the presidency of Donald Trump.
Nothing Personal is both a eulogy and a declaration of will. In bringing this work into the twenty-first century, readers new and old will take away fundamental and recurring truths about life in the US. It is both a call to action, and an appeal to love and to life.