Last Updated on June 9, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 193

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.

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Hardy, Clarence E. James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.

Kinnamon, Keneth, comp. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Miller, D. Quentin, ed. Re-viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

O’Daniel, Therman B., ed. James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1981.

Porter, Horace A. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.

Standley, Fred L., and Nancy V. Burt, eds. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988.

Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. James Baldwin. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.

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.

Troupe, Quincy, ed. James Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Weatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989.

Last Updated on June 4, 2020, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 277

Sources

Bigsby, C.W.E, Introduction to The Black American Writer, Vol. 1, Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1969.

Howe, Irving, "Black Boys and Native Sons," in Dissent, Autumn, 1963.

Macebuh, Stanley, James Baldwin: A Critical Study, Third Press, 1973.

Pratt, Louis H., Twayne's U.S. Authors Series: James Baldwin, G.K. Hall & Co., 1978.

Reilly, John M., '"Sonny's Blues': James Baldwin's Image of Black Community," in James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Keith Kinnamon, Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Further Reading

Albert, Richard N., "The Jazz-Blues Motif in Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues'," in College Literature, Spring, 1984, pp. 178-85.

This article discusses the use that Baldwin makes of music in "Sonny's Blues," and explains the role that jazz and blues play in the African-American tradition.

Bone, Robert A., The Negro Novel in America Yale University Press, 1958.

A classic, if somewhat dated, historical evaluation of the place of the novel in the African-American literary tradition and the place of African-American novels in American literary history. A "Postscript" concentrates specifically on James Baldwin.

Hakutam, Yoshinobu, and Robert Butler, The City in African-American Literature, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995.

Containing two essays specifically about James Baldwin, this collection traces the use of the image of the city in African-American Literature from Frederick Douglass to the present day. One of the Baldwin essays, by Fred L. Standley, holds that Baldwin viewed the city as far superior to the countryside, and discusses Baldwin's trips to the South.

O'Daniel, Therman B., editor, James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation, Howard University Press, 1977.

O'Daniel has compiled the works of others that provide an assessment of Baldwin as an essayist, playwright, and fiction writer. It deals extensively with Baldwin's principal works and less with his short stories.

Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 244

As one story among eight in Going to Meet the Man, "Sonny's Blues" gains depth and coherence when read against the others in the collection. The title story in particular, which recounts through a series of flashbacks the emotional core of a sadistic white Southern sheriff who brutalizes his black prisoners during the Civil Rights movement, offers a compelling counterpoint to the frustrations and anger felt by of Sonny and his brother.

Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell it On the Mountain, was published just four years before "Sonny's Blues," and in this story (which also incorporates many autobiographical elements of Baldwin's life) a young man's initiation into adulthood is marked by religious, racial, and familial strife. Another Country, written in the early sixties, has as one central character, Rufus Scott, a disillusioned jazz drummer whose experiences of racial prejudice and feelings of alienation from family and society can be read productively against the character of Sonny.

For an important political and historical gloss on "Sonny's Blues," Baldwin's personal essays and cultural criticism provide much insight, In Notes of a Native Son and in particular the early essay "The Harlem Ghetto," Baldwin discusses what it is to be a black man in America at mid-century. The Fire Next Time, perhaps his more celebrated collection of essays, claims in part that concepts of identity based only on skin color are ultimately destructive, and his arguments regarding this country's racial wounds are infused with a profound humanism.