Baldwin, James

Baldwin, James (1924–1987), writer.Baldwin was born in New York City's Harlem to Emma Berdis Jones, who later married David Baldwin, a migrant from New Orleans. The elder Baldwin, a preacher who resented his stepson's illegitimacy, tried to crush the young Jimmy's imaginative spirit. The problematic nature of their relationship would recur in Baldwin's works. The precocious Baldwin haunted Harlem's libraries; such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe profoundly influenced him. As a teenager, he preached in his father's Pentecostal church.

Racist rebuffs when he sought employment in New Jersey, along with fellowship support, contributed to Baldwin's decision to emigrate to Paris in 1948. His first and best‐received novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), drew on his own experience. Returning frequently to the United States during the era of the civil rights movement, he marched; wrote Blues for Mister Charles (1964), a play about the movement; and, in 1963, with other black activists and artists, met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy to seek solutions to the racial crisis.

Baldwin offered seminal statements on America's burdened racial history in two influential collections of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963). He returned to these themes in Going to Meet the Man (1965) and Evidence of Things Not Seen (1981), on a series of child murders in Atlanta. He offered groundbreaking treatments of homosexuality in his novels Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1962).

Of African American writers who substantially shaped American culture, Baldwin ranks near the top. During almost forty years of writing and lecturing, he encouraged Americans to live up to their ideals, to make democracy a reality, to live and work in harmony, and to turn their profession of Christianity into reality.
See also African Americans; Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Literature: Since World War II; Pentecostalism.

Bibliography

David Leeming , James Baldwin: A Biography, 1994.
Trudier Harris, ed., New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1996.

Trudier Harris