James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin was an American writer and civil rights activist who worked in essays, novels, plays and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time among the top hundred English-language novels, and the 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son established him as a voice for human equality. His fiction explores identity, race and sexuality together, at a time when doing so publicly carried real cost. He was a formidable orator: his 1965 debate with William F. Buckley is still regarded as one of the most influential public arguments about race in the United States.
Movies (3)
Books (15)
- James Baldwin (2014)
- Just Above My Head (1994)
- Go Tell It on the Mountain (1993)
- Giovanni's Room (1993)
- Nobody Knows My Name (1991)
- Prentice Hall Literature--The American Experience (1989)
- If Beale Street Could Talk (1986)
- Going to Meet the Man (1986)
- No Name in the Street (1986)
- Blues For Mister Charlie (1970)
- Tell me how long the train's been gone (1968)
- The Amen Corner (1968)
- Another Country (1963)
- The fire next time (1963)
- Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Where to start with James Baldwin
Read The fire next time first. It is short, it is the best prose he wrote, and it does in a hundred pages what most writers cannot do in a career. Then Giovanni's Room, the novel that cost him the most to publish and reads as though it did. Go Tell It on the Mountain is the autobiographical starting point if you prefer chronology, Notes of a Native Son the essays that built his reputation, and If Beale Street Could Talk the tenderest.