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Books by and about James Baldwin
Go
Tell It on the Mountain /
The Fire Next Time
/
Notes of a Native Son
/
If Beale
Street Could Talk
Carol E. Henderson,
James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical And
Critical Essays.
Peter Lang
Publishing, 2006.
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James
Baldwin
(1924-1987)
American Essayist
James Arthur Baldwin--born in Harlem, New York, August 2, 1924--was probably the most popular Negro writer from
the mid-50s through the mid-60s. For the civil rights movement,
he provided a vital literary voice. The eldest of nine children,
his stepfather was a minister. At age fourteen, Baldwin became a
preacher at the Fireside Pentecostal in Harlem, motivated
probably in ecclesiastical ambitions from a need to gain respect
from his stepfather.
After he graduated from high school, he moved to Greenwich
Village. In the early 1940s, he transferred his faith from
religion to literature. Critics, nevertheless, still note the
impassioned cadences of Black church rhetoric in his writings.
Go
Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his first novel, is a
partially autobiographical account of his youth. His essay
collections
Notes of a Native Son (1955),
Nobody Know
My Name (1961) were influential in informing a large white
audience.
From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of
France, but often returned to the USA to lecture or teach. In
1957, he began spending half of each year in New York City. his
novels include
Giovanni's Room (1956), about a white American
expatriate who must come to terms with his homosexuality, and
Another Country (1962), about racial and gay sexual tensions
among New York intellectuals. His inclusion of gay themes
resulted in a lot of savage criticism from the Black community.
Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers stated that
Baldwin's writing displayed an "agonizing, total hatred of
blacks." Baldwin's play,
Blues for Mister Charlie,
was produced in 1964.
Going to Meet the Man (1965) and
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) provided powerful
descriptions of American racism. As an openly gay man, he became
increasingly outspoken in condemning discrimination against
lesbian and gay people.
| Selected Works
Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953
Notes of a Native Son, 1955
Giovanni's Room, 1956
Nobody Know
My Name (, 1962
Another Country, 1962
The Fire Next Time, 1963
Blues for Mister Charlie (a play, produced in 1964)
Going to Meet the Man, 1965
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, 1968
A Rap on Race, with Margaret Mead, 1971
If Beale
Street Could Talk 1974
The Devil Finds Work, 1976
Just Above My Head, 1979
The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction,
1948-1985, 1985
Perspectives: Angles on African Art, 1987
Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989
Early Novels and Stories, 1998
Collected Essays, 1998 (ed. by Toni Morrison) |
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Take this
Hammer—a James Baldwin documentary
KQED's film unit
follows poet and activist James Baldwin in the spring of
1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with
members of the local African-American community. He is
escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director Orville
Luster and intent on discovering: "The real situation of
negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco
would like to present." He declares: "There is no moral
distance . . . between the facts of life in San Francisco
and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone's got to tell
it like it is. And that's where it's at." Includes frank
exchanges with local people on the street, meetings with
community leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot
from a moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and Western
Addition neighborhoods.
Baldwin reflects on the
racial inequality that African-Americans are forced to
confront and at one point tries to lift the morale of a
young man by expressing his conviction that "There will be a
negro president of this country but it will not be the
country that we are sitting in now."
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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updated 2 October 2007 / update 24 February
2008
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