Examining the Life and Writing of James Baldwin
Examining the Life and Writing of James Baldwin
In the four decades of his writing career, James Baldwin made an extraordinarily prolific and wide-ranging contribution to American letters. He published six novels, a collection of short stories, two plays, a screenplay about the life of Malcolm X that later became one of the bases for the Spike Lee film, a volume of poems, two book-length dialogues (one with anthropologist Margaret Mead, the other with poet Nikki Giovanni), a short book (part autobiographically-based and part sociologically) about American movies, a long essay on a series of murders of young African-American children in Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1980s, and five other volumes of essays and nonfiction. His early novels, especially the first two, excited substantial notice and critical acclaim, and they have continued to hold their reputations, but there is a strong body of opinion to the effect that it is in his nonfiction writings that his greatest and most enduring work is to be found.
James Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924. His name at birth was James Arthur Jones. Baldwin never knew his father; his mother, who was originally from Maryland, was named Emma Burdis Jones. In 1927, she married David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher and factory worker from New Orleans with a twelve-year-old son, and thus the future writer received the last name that he was to make famous. Together the couple went on to have six children of their own, three sons and three daughters, the last of whom was born on the very day--July 29, 1943--that David Baldwin died.
In 1935, James entered P.S. 139 (Frederick Douglass Junior High School), where he wrote for and helped to edit the school magazine, and where he came to know the poet Countee Cullen, a faculty member at the school who had been one of the principal writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. From 1938 until his graduation in 1942, Baldwin attended De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where his friends and classmates included the photographer Richard Avedon and the publisher and novelist Sol Stein. He had a religious experience in 1938, and for the next three years was a boy preacher at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, a phase of his life that ended at the time of his high-school graduation.
For the next several years, he worked at...