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In the four decades of his writing career, James Baldwin made an extraordinarily prolific and wide-ranging contribution to American letters. He published six novels, a collection of short stories, two plays, a screenplay about the life of Malcolm X that later became one of the bases for the Spike Lee film, a volume of poems, two book-length dialogues (one with anthropologist Margaret Mead, the other with poet Nikki Giovanni), a short book (part autobiographically-based and part sociologically) about American movies, a long essay on a series of murders of young African-American children in Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1980 s, and five other volumes of essays and nonfiction. His early novels, especially the first two, excited substantial notice and critical acclaim, and they have continued to hold their reputations, but there is a strong body of opinion to the effect that it is in his nonfiction writings that his greatest and most enduring work is to be found. James Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924.
His name at birth was James Arthur Jones. Baldwin never knew his father; his mother, who was originally from Maryland, was named Emma Birds Jones. In 1927, she married David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher and factory worker from New Orleans with a twelve-year-old son, and thus the future writer received the last name that he was to make famous. Together the couple went on to have six children of their own, three sons and three daughters, the last of whom was born on the very day -- July 29, 1943 -- that David Baldwin died.
In 1935, James entered P. S. 139 (Frederick Douglass Junior High School), where he wrote for and helped to edit the school magazine, and where he came to know the poet County Cullen, a faculty member at the school who had been one of the principal writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920 s. From 1938 until his graduation in 1942, Baldwin attended De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where his friends and classmates included the photographer Richard Avedon and the publisher and novelist Sol Stein. He had a religious experience in 1938, and for the next three years was a boy preacher at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, a phase of his life that ended at the time of his high-school graduation. For the next several years, he worked at a variety of jobs, including waiting tables in Greenwich Village, where he had moved to further his artistic ambitions. In 1944, he met Richard Wright, author of the novel Native Son and the soon-to-be-published autobiography Black Boy, who encouraged his literary ambitions and recommended him, without success, to his own publisher.
Baldwin, for whom Wright was the greatest influence and therefore the most serious obstacle to his independent development as a writer, would later criticize Wright's work in print, an action that caused an estrangement between the two novelists. Beginning in the mid- 1940 s and continuing for the rest of his life, Baldwin devoted himself to a full-time writing career. While still in his early twenties, he began to place stories, essays, and reviews in such influential publications as Commentary, The Nation, and Partisan Review, the last of which published "Sonny's Blues" in the summer of 1957. In November 1948, Baldwin moved to Paris; in the years that followed, he would travel frequently about the world and spend much time in New York, but France would essentially remain his home. Amidst his nonfiction writing, he continued to work on an autobiographical novel that at various stages in its development was called "Crying Holy" and "In My Father's House. " It was published in 1953 as Go Tell It on the Mountain, to a strongly positive reception. His second novel, Giovanni's Room, was published in 1956 after being rejected by several publishers, and quickly went into a second printing.
It focused not on race relations but a homosexual love affair, a theme that, however discreetly it was presented, was bold for the times, and emblematic of Baldwin's refusal to accept limits upon the range of his explorations or areas of concern. His third novel, In Another Country (1962), traced the interlocking patterns of desire and destruction among a racially mixed group of friends and lovers. It was longer and more complex -- and received a more uneven reception -- than either of its predecessors: despite scenes of painful intensity and harrowing insight, the consensus was that in this book Baldwin's ambitions had outpaced his realization of them. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) and Just Above My Head (1979) were also longer and more diffuse than Baldwin's first two novels.
If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), shorter and more concentrated in its effect, was lavishly praised on its appearance by a number of reviewers, but is generally regarded as a lesser work. Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin's first collection of essays, appeared in 1955. The title itself acknowledged the debt that he, and all black writers of his generation, owed to Richard Wright. In 1961 appeared Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, which included such important pieces as "Faulkner and Desegregation" and "Alas, Poor Richard, " a memoir -- Richard Wright had died suddenly of a heart attack in 1960, at only fifty-two years of age -- in which Baldwin tried to sort out the strengths and limitations of, and his own complex feelings about, the man and writer who had meant so much to him.
In 1963, Baldwin published The Fire Next Time. In "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind, " by far the longer of the two essays in the volume, he expressed, in some of the most lucid and searing prose of his life, his anger at past and present outrages inflicted upon African-Americans and his fears about the future of race relations in the United States. Throughout his life, Baldwin met and in many cases befriended some of the most important artists and public figures of his age, including Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
But he never let himself be blinded by celebrity, his own or anyone else's, and to the end his artistic and moral credo remained as he had expressed it in a book review as early as 1948: "The gulf between our dream and the realities that we live with is something that we do not understand and do not wish to admit. It is almost as though we were asking that others look at what we want and turn their eyes, as we do, away from what we are. I am not, as I hope is clear, speaking of civil liberties, social equality, etc. , where, indeed, a strenuous battle is yet carried on; I am speaking, instead, of a particular shallowness of mind, an intellectual and spiritual laxness, a terror of individual responsibility and a corresponding terror of change. This rigid refusal to look at ourselves may well destroy us, particularly now, since if we cannot understand ourselves we will not be able to understand anything. " In some of his later work, Baldwin, in the opinion of many, substituted rhetoric and propaganda for the subtlety and honesty of his earlier essays. Despite poor reviews, neglect, and a widespread assumption that his time had passed, he was a productive writer of fiction and especially nonfiction to the end of his life.
When diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in early 1987, he remained cheerful and active, hosting a Thanksgiving dinner for friends and family only days before his death on December 1 of that year. The ruthless self-examination that precedes self-understanding had been a more painful process for Baldwin than for many others: as a black man in a racist society, as a homosexual in a homophobic society, as someone who despised his looks in a society that values personal appearance over achievement, he was tortured by issues of identity and acceptance throughout much of his life. But in his finest work he followed the truth, no matter where it led him, with as much consistency and integrity as any writer of his time.
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Research essay sample on Examining The Life And Writing Of James Baldwin
