The Complete Works of James Baldwin

See James Baldwin

James Baldwin
1924-1987
Author--Activist
Preacher-- Playwright
Complete
works

• The Preservation of Innocence (1949)...An essay originally published in the Moroccan Journal Zero and possibly also known as "Everybody's Protest Novel."



• Outing (1951)...Believed one of Baldwin's "best", this outing is one by boat on the Hudson River by the same family that appears in Go tell it on the mountain. But, it approaches innocent homosexual feelings between two adolescents, which was really an almost taboo subject in 1951. Foreboding both attraction and danger, Baldwin writes, "But now where there had been peace there was only panic and where there had been safety, danger. like a flower, opened."



• Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953)...What many consider to be an auto-biography, isn't; It's just a close facsimile. Obviously lifted from his own life, it chronicles a young man's life much as his own had been, practically raised in a storefront church, John Grimes deals with his father's "towering hypocrisy" and the "ghosts of their sinful past." In a story that spans but a single day, Baldwin, "dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to urban North."



• Giovanni's Room (1956)...Baldwin's second novel explores a young man's struggle or evolvement of his sexual identity; Attracted to both his fiance and a male bartender in 1950's Paris, this young expatriate is "confounded and tortured as he oscillates between the two."



• Notes of a Native Son (1955)...An essay which runs the gamut from commentaries about Harlem, bigoted religion, the Negro press, to the student milieu of Paris and Baldwin's own birthright as a black man. Baldwin approaches his subjects from a half-American, half African-American point of view, a reference point that many find troublesome but it certainly provides hours of reading entertainment, regardless.



• The Amen Corner (1955)...A play produced at Howard University and on Broadway ten years later.



• Nobody Knows My Name (1961)...A collection of essays illuminating race relations and the role of the writer in society...personal accounts of Norman Mailer, Richard Wright and more.



• Another Country (1962)...Revolves around Rufus, who Baldwin hopes will idealize the tragic hero caught between "the time when men such as him had no freedom and the time to come." Aware of the suspicions of the white world and of his own attractions, he will go to distrust and despise white friends, will become destitute and forlorn and will eventually jump to his death off the George Washington Bridge. In the novel, Baldwin said,"because I don't think anyone had ever watched the disintegration of a black boy from that particular point of view."



• The Fire Next Time (1963)...Contains two essays, "My Dungeon Shook" and "Down at the Cross" which both appeared in the November 17, 1962 issue of The New Yorker.



• Blues for Mister Charlie (1964)...Baldwin's play based on the murder of a young black man in Mississippi and produced by the Actors studio in New York.



• Going to Meet the Man (1965)...After seeing first hand, the violence inflicted on blacks in the deep south, Baldwin uses a southern sheriff to demonstrate everything that Baldwin had preached against. He offers the sheriff's "humanity" as a racial cliche, which allows Baldwin a blank canvas on which to paint his own feelings about the south and race and sex and violence, describing a white's unbearable details of a lynching and his lust for black women. Very inflammatory work.



• Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968)... The story of "Leo Proudhammer", an actor from Harlem and his relationships with his Greenwich Village roomates, an unmarried white couple, and later with a young black militant much like Malcolm X.



• A Rap on Race (1971)...Notes and dialog on a seven-and-a-half-hour meeting between Baldwin and Cultural Anthropologist Margaret Mead. With Baldwin's expertise on black American History and Mead's experience with racism in different cultures around the world, the discussion was naturally filled with "passion, rage, and brilliance and a shared desire to find the thread that binds us all."



• No Name in the Street (1972)...Collections of Essays written while Baldwin was living in Istanbul and St. Paul-de-Vincent, France.



• One Day when I was lost (1973)...A screenplay based on Alex Haley's The autobiography of Malcolm X.



• If Beale Street Could Talk (1972)..."A powerful indictment of American concepts of justice and punishment in our time." Another young black man, unjustly arrested, is the protagonist of this strong emotional drama which succintly and powerfully states the anger and pain involved, and the love that sustains the black family.



• The Devil Finds Work (1976)...More Collections of essays.



• Little Man, Little Man (1977)...A Childrens Book.



• Just Above My Head (1979)...Baldwin's sixth and longest novel. Revolves around a group of friends and centers on one, Arthur Montana, and the decline of his career as a gospel singer.



• The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985 (1985)



• The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985)...Written on assignment for Playboy, it was an account of the murder of 28 black children in Atlanta, Georgia in 1980 and 1981.




Articles by James Baldwin

• Sermons and Blues (1959)...Baldwin presents the "Selected Poems of Langston Hughes"; A poet Baldwin reveres for his ability to emote the "power and beat of Negro speech and Negro music." Baldwin expresses amazement at Hughes' gifts--and "depressed that he has done so little with them."



• The American Dream and the American Negro (March 7, 1965)



• Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because they're Anti-White (April 9, 1967)



• How One Black Man Came To Be An American: A Review of "Roots" (September 26, 1976)...A review of Alex Haley's "Roots" which Baldwin brings front and center to a current presidential election and speaks of the great responsibility of black people now, at the "end of the black diaspora."



• Last of the Great Masters (October 16, 1977)...Reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, October 16, 1977.



• An Open Letter to Mr. Carter...Published in the New York Times January 23, 1977.



• If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? (July 29, 1979)...An essay that tackles the origin of Black English and reasons for it's continued existence. Succinctly stated, Baldwin applies that Black English is one that the white man could not understand, one that existed "by means of brutal necessity." A white's understanding would "reveal to him too much about himself, and smash the mirror before which he has been frozen for so long."



• Whose Harlem is this anyway?.....Baldwin's last essay...A return to the Harlem of his youth and wondering where it went... Each generation has had to look out on this dangerous and lonely place and try to invest it with coherence ...but also grateful and surprised for the reception he received there.