After high school, Baldwin studied at The New School, where he found an intellectual community that he could identify with. There, along with Richard Avedon, he worked on the school magazine-Baldwin as its literary editor-but disliked school. James attended DeWitt Clinton High School, in the Bronx's Bedford Park section. The quest to answer or explain familial and social repudiation-and attain a sense of self, both coherent and benevolent-became a motif in Baldwin's writing. The day of the funeral was James's 19th birthday, the day his father's last child was born, and the day of the Harlem Riot of 1943, which was the portrait opening his essay "Notes of a Native Son". His stepfather died of tuberculosis in summer of 1943 soon before James turned 19. His adoptive father, whom James in essays called simply his father, appears to have treated James-versus James's siblings-with singular harshness. At age ten, he was beaten by a gang of police officers. James spent much time caring for his several younger brothers and sisters. There, she married a preacher, David Baldwin. When Baldwin was an infant, his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, divorced his father amid his drug abuse and moved to the Harlem section of Manhattan in New York City. 3 James Baldwin and Saint-Paul de Vence.Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, is said to be his best-known work. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, written well before gay equality was widely espoused in America: Giovanni's Room (1956). Some Baldwin essays are book-length, for instance The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976).īaldwin's novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration of not only blacks, but also of gay and bisexual men, while depicting some internalized obstacles to such individuals' quests for acceptance.
Baldwin's essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions. James Arthur Baldwin (Aug– December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. Writer, novelist, poet, playwright, activist
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