Discussion Topics
Why does James Baldwin find it so difficult to endorse the work of writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Richard Wright, who would seem to be his colleagues in the struggle against racism?
Baldwin is described as having been influenced by Henry James, a white novelist whose characters tend to be part of the upper crust of society and whose style is very sophisticated and elaborate. Considering Baldwin’s background and typical subject matter, what could Baldwin expect to learn from James?
In what ways, other than in his identity as an African American, did Baldwin feel himself to be an outsider? Did his writing benefit from this outsider status?
In his essay “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin concludes that he must accept life and people as they are but that he must not accept injustice. Since injustice is always caused by human beings, how is this possible?
Can a white American ever be as conscious of his or her own race as Baldwin was of his?
What evidence is there that Baldwin abandoned his early refusal to read the Bible?
Other Literary Forms
In addition to one edition of short stories, James Baldwin published more than twenty other works, including novels, essays, two plays, a screenplay on Malcolm X, one play adaptation, a children’s book, two series of dialogues, and a collection of poetry, as well as numerous shorter pieces embracing interviews, articles, and recordings.
Achievements
James Baldwin received numerous awards and fellowships during his life, including the Rosenwald, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Partisan Review fellowships, a Ford Foundation Grant, and the George Polk Memorial Award. In 1986, shortly before his death, the French government made him a Commander of the Legion of Honor.
Other Literary Forms
Best known for his novels and essays, James Baldwin contributed to every contemporary genre except poetry. Baldwin established his literary reputation with Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel that anticipates the thematic concerns of The Amen Corner. Subsequent novels, including Another Country (1962), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979), along with the brilliant story “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), confirmed Baldwin’s stature as a leading figure in postwar American fiction. Several of Baldwin’s early essays, collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961), are today recognized as classics. His essays on Richard Wright, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and “Many Thousands Gone” (1951), occupy a central position in the development, during the 1950’s, of “universalist” African American thought. The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps Baldwin’s most important work of nonfiction, is an extended meditation on the relationship of race, religion, and the individual experience. No Name in the Street (1971), emphasizing the failure of the United States to heed the warning of The Fire Next Time, asserts the more militant political stance articulated in Blues for Mister Charlie. Less formal and intricate, though in some cases more explicit, statements of Baldwin’s positions can be found in A Rap on Race (1971), an extended discussion with Margaret Mead, and A Dialogue (1975; with Nikki Giovanni). Of special interest in relation to Baldwin’s drama are the unfilmed scenario One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976), which focuses on Baldwin’s personal and aesthetic frustrations with the American film industry.
Achievements
James Baldwin’s high-profile career, in both the literary and the political spheres, earned for him widespread recognition and a number of awards. Early in his career, he was granted the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust fellowship in 1945, followed by the Rosenwald Fellowship...
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in 1948. In 1956 he was awarded a Partisan Review Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letter grant for literature, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, followed three years later by a Ford Foundation grant. His magazine articles earned him a George Polk Memorial Award in 1963 and in 1964Blues for Mister Charlie earned a Foreign Drama Critics Award and The Fire Next Time was given a National Association of Independent Schools Award. Just Above my Head was nominated in 1980 for the American Book Award. France honored him in 1986 by naming him Commander of the Legion of Honor. He served as a member of several organizations throughout his lifetime, including the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Authors’ League, International PEN, Dramatists Guild, Actors Studio, and the Congress of Racial Equality.
Other literary forms
Before he published his first novel, James Baldwin had established a reputation as a talented essayist and reviewer. Many of his early pieces, later collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961), have become classics; his essays on Richard Wright, especially “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and “Many Thousands Gone” (1951), occupy a central position in the development of “universalist” African American thought during the 1950’s. Culminating in The Fire Next Time (1963), an extended meditation on the relationship of race, religion, and the individual experience in America, Baldwin’s early prose demands a reexamination and redefinition of received social and cultural premises. His collections of essays No Name in the Street (1971) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) reflected a more militant stance and were received less favorably than Baldwin’s universalist statements. The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) is a book-length essay on the case known as the Atlanta child murders, and The Price of the Ticket (1985) includes all of Baldwin’s essay collections as well as a number of previously uncollected pieces. Less formal and intricate, though in some cases more explicit, reflections of Baldwin’s beliefs can be found in A Rap on Race (1971), an extended discussion between Baldwin and anthropologist Margaret Mead, and A Dialogue (1975), a conversation with poet Nikki Giovanni.
Baldwin also wrote children’s fiction (Little Man, Little Man, 1975), the text for a photographic essay (Nothing Personal, 1964, with Richard Avedon), an unfilmed scenario (One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” 1972), dramas, and short stories. Most critics prefer Baldwin’s first play, The Amen Corner (pr. 1954), to his Blues for Mister Charlie (pr. 1964) despite the latter’s four-month Broadway run. Although he published little short fiction after the collection Going to Meet the Man (1965), Baldwin was an acknowledged master of the novella form. “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), the story of the relationship of a jazz musician to his “respectable” narrator-brother, anticipates many of the themes of Baldwin’s later novels and is widely recognized as one of the great American novellas.
Achievements
James Baldwin’s role as a major spokesman on race guarantees his place in American cultural history. Although not undeserved, this reputation more frequently obscures than clarifies the nature of his literary achievement, which involves his relationship to African American culture, existential philosophy, and the moral tradition of the world novel. To be sure, Baldwin’s progression from an individualistic, universalist stance through active involvement with the integrationist Civil Rights movement to an increasing sympathy with militant pan-Africanist thought parallels the general development of African American thought between the early 1950’s and the mid-1970’s. Indeed, Baldwin’s novels frequently mirror both the author’s personal philosophy and its social context. Some, most notably Another Country, attained a high degree of public visibility when published, leading to a widely accepted vision of Baldwin as a topical writer. Consideration of Baldwin primarily as a racial spokesman, however, imposes a stereotype that distorts many of his most penetrating insights and underestimates his status as a literary craftsman.
More accurate, although ultimately as limited, is the view of Baldwin primarily as an exemplar of the African American presence in the “mainstream” of the American tradition. Grouped with Ralph Ellison as a major “post-Wright” black novelist, Baldwin represents, in this view, the generation that rejected “protest literature” in favor of “universal” themes. Strangely at odds with the view of Baldwin as racial spokesman, this view emphasizes the craftsmanship of Baldwin’s early novels and his treatment of “mainstream” themes such as religious hypocrisy, father-son tensions, and sexual identity. Ironically, many younger African American novelists accept this general view of Baldwin’s accomplishment, viewing his mastery of Jamesian techniques and his involvement with continental literary culture as an indication of alienation from his racial identity. Recasting political activist Eldridge Cleaver’s political attack on Baldwin in aesthetic terms, the African American writer Ishmael Reed dismisses Baldwin as a great “white” novelist. A grain of truth lies in Reed’s assertion; Baldwin rarely created new forms. Rather, he infused a variety of Euro-American forms, derived from Wright and William Faulkner as well as from Henry James, with the rhythms and imagery of the African American oral tradition.
Like the folk preacher whose voice he frequently assumed in secular contexts, Baldwin combined moral insight with an uncompromising sense of the concrete realities of his community, whether defined in terms of family, lovers, race, or nation. This indicates the deepest level of Baldwin’s literary achievement; whatever his immediate political focus or fictional form, he possessed an insight into moral psychology shared by only a handful of novelists. Inasmuch as the specific circumstances of this psychology involve American racial relations, this insight aligns Baldwin with Wright, Faulkner, Mark Twain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Inasmuch as Baldwin’s insight involves the symbolic alienation of the individual, it places him with American romantics such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and European existentialists such as Albert Camus. Since his insight recognizes the complex pressure exerted by social mechanisms on individual consciousness, it reveals affinities with James Joyce, George Eliot, and Ellison. As a writer who combined elements of all of these traditions with the voice of the anonymous African American preacher, Baldwin cannot be reduced to accommodate the terms of any one of them. Refusing to lie about the reality of pain, he provided realistic images of the moral life possible in the inhospitable world that encompasses the streets of Harlem and the submerged recesses of the mind.
Bibliography
Balfour, Lawrie Lawrence, and Katherine Lawrence Balfour. The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Explores the political dimension of Baldwin’s essays, stressing the politics of race in American democracy.
Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking Press, 1991. Good narrative biography is organized into five sections, each focusing on a particular period of Baldwin’s life. Places Baldwin’s work within the context of his times. Includes detailed notes and bibliography.
Fabré, Michel. “James Baldwin in Paris: Love and Self-Discovery.” In From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Discusses Baldwin’s Paris experiences. Brings biographical details to the European experiences of the bicontinental playwright, who owed France “his own spiritual growth, through the existential discovery of love as a key to life.” The notes offer interview sources of quotations for further study.
Harris, Trudier, ed. New Essays on “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Collection of essays examines the composition, themes, publication history, public reception, and contemporary interpretations of Baldwin’s first novel. Some of the essays discuss Baldwin’s treatment of God, the American South, and homosexuality in the novel.
Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974. A good introduction to Baldwin’s early work featuring a collection of diverse essays by such well-known figures as Irving Howe, Langston Hughes, Sherley Anne Williams, and Eldridge Cleaver. Includes a chronology of important dates, notes on the contributors, and a select bibliography.
Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. A biography of Baldwin written by one who knew him and worked with him for the last quarter century of his life. Provides extensive literary analysis of Baldwin’s work and relates his work to his life.
McBride, Dwight A., ed. James Baldwin Now. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Collection of essays reevaluates Baldwin’s work, stressing the usefulness of interdisciplinary approaches in understanding Baldwin’s appeal, political thought and work, and legacy. The contributors maintain that Baldwin was not an exclusively gay, expatriate, black, or activist writer but instead was a complex combination of all of those things.
Miller, D. Quentin, ed. Re-viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Collection of essays explores the ways in which Baldwin’s writing touched on issues that confront all people, including race, identity, sexuality, and religious ideology. Works analyzed include the novels Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, and Just Above My Head.
O’Daniel, Therman B., ed. James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1981. This useful introduction to Baldwin groups essays in six categories such as “Baldwin as Novelist,” “Baldwin as Essayist,” and “Baldwin as Playwright.” Supplemented by a detailed bibliography, notes on contributors, and an index.
Porter, Horace A. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Originally a doctoral dissertation; the author expanded his original material and published it following Baldwin’s death. Porter attempts to relate Baldwin to the larger African American tradition of social protest.
Pratt, Louis H. James Baldwin. Boston: Twayne, 1978. This well-balanced evaluation of Baldwin emphasizes the artist and his literary art. Pratt firmly believes that Baldwin’s major contribution to American letters is in the essay form. Complemented by a chronology, a select bibliography, and an index.
Romanet, Jerome de. “Revisiting Madeleine and ‘The Outing’: James Baldwin’s Revision of Gide’s Sexual Politics.” MELUS 22 (Spring, 1997): 3-14. A discussion of Baldwin’s story “The Outing” in terms of its contrast with Gide’s Calvinist guilt. Discusses sexual identity in this story and other Baldwin fictions. Argues that Baldwin’s exile in France was as concerned with racial identity as with sexual emancipation.
Sanderson, Jim. “Grace in ‘Sonny’s Blues.’” Short Story, n.s. 6 (Fall, 1998): 85-95. Argues that Baldwin’s most famous story illustrates his integration of the personal with the social in terms of his residual evangelical Christianity. Argues that at the end of the story when the narrator offers Sonny a drink, he puts himself in the role of Lord, and Sonny accepts the cup of wrath; the two brothers thus regain grace by means of the power of love.
Scott, Lynn Orilla. James Baldwin’s Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002. Analyzes the decline of Baldwin’s reputation after the 1960’s, the ways in which critics have often undervalued his work, and the interconnected themes in his body of work.
Sherard, Tracey. “Sonny’s Bebop: Baldwin’s ‘Blues Text’ as Intracultural Critique.” African American Review 32 (Winter, 1998): 691-705. A discussion of Houston Baker’s notion of the “blues matrix” in Baldwin’s story; examines the story’s treatment of black culture in America as reflected by jazz and the blues. Discusses how the “blues text” of the story represents how intracultural narratives have influenced the destinies of African Americans.
Standley, Fred L., and Nancy V. Burt, eds. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. An attempt to anthologize the important criticism on Baldwin in one definitive volume. More than thirty-five articles focus on Baldwin’s essays, fiction, nonfiction, and drama.
Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. James Baldwin. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Good overview of Baldwin’s work provides an aesthetic perspective, a bibliographical summary, and an analysis of individual works, with greatest emphasis given to Baldwin’s plays, novels, and short stories.
Tomlinson, Robert. “‘Payin’ One’s Dues’: Expatriation as Personal Experience and Paradigm in the Works of James Baldwin.” African American Review 33 (Spring, 1999): 135-148. A discussion of the effect of life as an exile in Paris had on Baldwin. Argues that the experience internalized the conflicts he experienced in America. Suggests that Baldwin used his homosexuality and exile as a metaphor for the experience of the African American.
Troupe, Quincy, ed. James Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Contains eighteen essays by and about Baldwin, five of which were written for this collection, and homage and celebration from many who were profoundly influenced by him, including Pat Mikell’s account of Baldwin’s last days in St. Paul de Vence. With a foreword by Wole Soyinka.
Tsomondo, Thorell. “No Other Tale to Tell: ‘Sonny’s Blues’ and ‘Waiting for the Rain.’” Critique 36 (Spring, 1995): 195-209. Examines how art and history are related in “Sonny’s Blues.” Discusses the story as one in which a young musician replays tribal history in music. Argues that the story represents how African American writers try to reconstruct an invalidated tradition.
Weatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989. Lengthy personal reminiscence of Baldwin by a close friend who calls his biography a portrait. Based on conversations with more than one hundred people who knew Baldwin. Rich in intimate detail; reveals the man behind the words.
