Baldwin, James
Baldwin, James( 1924–87),born in Harlem, where for a short time in his youth he followed his father's footsteps as a preacher, and, as he says, “the rhetoric of the storefront church” has been among the influences on his prose. He left home at the age of 17 and subsequent travels included long expatriation in France. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), about a day in the lives of various members of a Harlem church and, through flashbacks, about their forebears, was immediately hailed as a major treatment of black life in the U.S. and helped to establish Baldwin as the leading black novelist since Richard Wright. His second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), was set in his new residence of Paris and concerned a man torn between homosexual love and love of a woman. His third novel, Another Country (1962), is a lengthy tale of complex human relations between races and sexes. His next novel, Tell Me How Long the Train's...
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