James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters.
#James baldwin famous books series#
The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.” Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin’s short fiction, including the masterful “Sonny’s Blues,” the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin’s most ambitious novel. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America’s racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him.
Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as “an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us.” Giovanni’s Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin’s own experience, of a preacher’s son coming of age in 1930’s Harlem. Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. This culminating volume in the Library of America edition of his fiction illustrates how Baldwin continues to be relevant in twenty-first-century America, especially in his dramatizing of the unequal treatment of black men by the police and the justice system, his nuanced depictions of the black family, and his explorations of sexuality. Sober in outlook but ambitious in scope, these works show Baldwin responding with his signature passion-for music, for justice, for life-and searching intelligence to the new realities of a rapidly changing cultural landscape, as the Movement era gives way to the age of identity politics that we still live in today. But by the late 1960s and ’70s many regarded Baldwin as being out of sync with the political and social currents transforming America: too integrationist for Black Arts Movement writers and others on the Left, yet too “pessimistic” for many white readers, and as a result his later novels have never received the consideration given his earlier fiction. With such landmark novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and the essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin established himself as the indispensable voice of the Civil Rights era, a figure whose prophetic exploration of the racial and sexual fissures in American society raised the consciousness of American readers. The Library of America completes its edition of the collected fiction of the literary voice of the Civil Rights era with this volume gathering three revealing later works of the 1960s and ’70s.
Includes If Beale Street Could Talk, now a major motion picture directed by Barry Jenkins.
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