James Baldwin was the conscience of the United States. He took a cold, hard look at his nation and called out its injustices in writing that was cadenced, even-handed, and true. He was a great novelist and, arguably, an even greater essayist; he simply knew things about the human soul that others didn’t know, and he expressed those things with stunning clarity.
Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York, the oldest of nine. At an early age, he became a prodigious reader and thinker, transcending the poverty and despair all around him. By fourteen, he was preaching in his local church, ad-libbing sermons and discovering for himself the power of language.
After a number of menial jobs and several devastating encounters that left him in no doubt about racism in the United States, he went to live in Paris. He was twenty-four years old, with forty dollars in his pocket.
In Paris, he found respite from white supremacy. He stayed, on and off, for nine years, fueled by ambition and talent and the generosity of friends. While there, he socialized with the likes of Richard Wright, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maya Angelou, and wrote his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. For the rest of his life, he shuttled between Europe and the United States, returning to his homeland for long enough to become a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement. He died of stomach cancer on December 1, 1987, in Saint-Paul de Vence, France.
Some of Baldwin’s best work is studded with observations that read like epigrams capturing eternal truths as if he knew he was writing for posterity. Here’s a line from his 1972 essay No Name in the Street: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” From The Devil Finds Work (1976): “The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”
His seminal book The Fire Next Time contains this sobering observation: “A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other.”
The unfortunate consequence of such condensed brilliance is that Baldwin’s writing can be reduced to slogans on X or Facebook memes. But his genius requires that we swallow him whole and read the longer works—for both pleasure and instruction—in their full context.
Where to start? Perhaps with the novels Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) and Another Country (1962). In both of these books, the Harlem of Baldwin’s youth features heavily, as do the themes of race and desire, alienation and guilt. They are critically acclaimed classics that illustrate the times in which they were written, but also hold perennial truths about the human condition.
For those who prefer non-fiction, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963) explore ideas of justice, identity, and freedom. As with Baldwin’s fiction, these books tell us everything we need to know about race relations in the United States. (Sad to say, the books haven’t aged much since they were first published.)
For those who prefer moving images, the documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016) is essential viewing. It’s based on thirty pages of notes written by Baldwin. He was planning a book about the slain martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. He never wrote the book, but in the documentary we are treated to Samuel L. Jackson reading Baldwin’s words, as well as TV interviews, footage of Baldwin delivering talks to students, and scenes from the Civil Rights Movement. It’s electrifying.
Baldwin was as brilliant a speaker as he was a writer. The boy preacher turned into a razor-sharp interviewee. One line that appeared in an interview for LIFE magazine encapsulates the central themes of his life and work, his knowledge of struggle and redemption: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
Baldwin’s body of work inspired numerous African American authors—the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Angela Davis, to name but a few—and countless readers. His shadow is long, his greatness unquestionable.
