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James Baldwin

1924–1987 · 63 years Tier I

Born James Jones, and he never learned his father's name

Portrait of James Baldwin — Allan warren — 1969 — CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

He was born James Arthur Jones at Harlem Hospital and never found out who his father was. Eight more children followed, and he raised most of them with a book in his free hand. At DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx he edited the literary magazine alongside a classmate named Richard Avedon. A painter, Beauford Delaney, showed him that a Black man could live as an artist and survive the choice. In 1942 he went to New Jersey to lay track and work in defense plants, and learned exactly what a counterman means when he says the place does not serve Negroes. His stepfather died on July 29, 1943. The funeral fell on Baldwin's 19th birthday, in a city that was on fire.

Giovanni's Room arrived in 1956 — a novel about white men in Paris from a writer everyone expected to keep writing about Harlem, and about desire between them, which nobody expected at all. Then Nobody Knows My Name, Another Country, the Broadway play Blues for Mister Charlie, No Name in the Street, If Beale Street Could Talk. BriefHistory takes the essays and the years he spent testifying to the country about itself. What is left over is what the movement did with a man it could never entirely use.

Eldridge Cleaver gave him a chapter of Soul on Ice in 1968, read his sexuality as racial betrayal, and much of the Black Power generation nodded along. The FBI, working from the other direction, accumulated 1,884 pages on him. He was too queer for the movement, too political for the literary establishment and too famous for either to ignore, and he lived on airplanes — Istanbul, Paris, New York, a rented house in the south of France he could not always afford. Within five years he buried Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. He described himself afterward not as a spokesman but as a witness, which is a smaller word and a heavier job.

Stomach cancer killed him at Saint-Paul-de-Vence on December 1, 1987, and hours later a French prize went to Harlem Quartet. He was buried at Ferncliff in Hartsdale, New York. For about 20 years he was taught as a period figure, the essayist of a decade that had closed. Then the decade turned out not to have closed. I Am Not Your Negro, built from 30 pages of an unfinished manuscript, won a BAFTA in 2016 and put him back in theaters, and Barry Jenkins filmed If Beale Street Could Talk two years later. The house in France, which admirers had campaigned for years to preserve, was demolished in 2019 to make room for apartments.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

James Baldwin's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Go Tell It on the Mountain book
His first novel, ten years in the writing 1953
Notes of a Native Son book
The essays that established him 1955
Giovanni's Room book
A novel with no Black characters and an unmistakable subject 1956
The Fire Next Time book
A letter to his nephew that sold a million copies 1963
Blues for Mister Charlie other
A play staged on Broadway, drawn from the murder of Emmett Till 1964
If Beale Street Could Talk book
Filmed by Barry Jenkins in 2018 1974

Life in brief

with age at each point

1938 aged ~14 Enters DeWitt Clinton High School and edits the literary magazine Richard Avedon worked on it with him.
July 29, 1943 aged 18 His stepfather dies on the day his mother delivers her last child The funeral fell on Baldwin's 19th birthday, as the Harlem riot began.
November 11, 1948 aged 24 Sails for Paris with 40 dollars A Rosenwald fellowship paid the fare. He gave most of the rest to his mother.
1953 aged ~29 Publishes Go Tell It on the Mountain
1956 aged ~32 Publishes Giovanni's Room A book his publishers expected to end his career. The reviews were good.
May 17, 1963 aged 38 Appears on the cover of Time The Fire Next Time had sold a million copies.
May 24, 1963 aged 38 Brings a group to confront Robert F. Kennedy in New York The meeting went badly and worked on Kennedy slowly.
1970 aged ~46 Settles permanently at Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France
December 1, 1987 aged 63 Dies of stomach cancer at 63