James Baldwin’s writing—novels, essays, short stories, reviews, and other works—is a masterful reflection of the postwar and civil rights periods. His work deals with questions of racial and gender identity, religion, and racism.
To understand much of James Baldwin’s work, it is important to know about his life. He was born in Harlem in New York City in 1924 into a generation after Richard Wright. He was the son of an unmarried domestic worker. She later married a factory worker, David Baldwin, who was a storefront preacher on the weekends. James Baldwin took his name and lived with the pain of his cruelty.
When he was 14, James Baldwin became a preacher himself. This lasted for three years. After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School and working at various jobs, Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan where he met Richard Wright.
It was 1944 and Wright’s novel, Native Son, had been out for four years and his semiautobiographical Black Boy would be out the next year. As with many other African-American writers, Baldwin was greatly influenced by the older author. Wright helped Baldwin win a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1948.
Meanwhile, Baldwin’s personal life and his disgust with American racism led him to leave the country. Although he visited New York City periodically, he lived in London, Paris, and Istanbul until he returned to the United States in 1957 to participate in the Civil Rights Movement.
By then, he had published many essays, book reviews, two novels (Go Tell It On the Mountain in 1953 and Giovanni’s Room in 1956), a play (The Amen Corner, 1955), and a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955).
In a review for the New York Times (Feb. 26, 1958), Langston Hughes wrote: “In ‘Notes of a Native Son,’ James Baldwin surveys in pungent commentary certain phases of the contemporary scene as they relate to the citizenry of the United States, particularly Negroes. Harlem, the protest novel, bigoted religion, the Negro press and the student milieu of Paris are all examined in black and white, with alternate shutters clicking, for hours of reading interest.”
The title essay, “Notes of a Native Son,” begins by telling the story of his stepfather’s funeral in Harlem in 1943. Baldwin attempts to come to terms with this man who had caused him so much emotional pain. At the same time, there is a race riot in Harlem. Baldwin expresses his own anger and frustration with American racism.
In the same review, Hughes wrote on Baldwin’s use of language: “Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin.”
James Baldwin went on to write numerous essays and novels. Although he returned to the United States to take part in civil rights protests and to teach at the University of Massachusetts, he returned to France where he died in 1987.
