This is - I believe anyway - the last book James Baldwin wrote and published before his death.  There are lots of other incomplete manuscripts and unpublished materials, but this is a full essay.  It's about a series of murders of black children in Atlanta in the early 1980's.  Its foremost project is to problematize … Continue reading James Baldwin – The Evidence of Things Not Seen →

I missed reading this the first time through.  I was trying to stick to chronological order but since this play wasn't included in the Library of America volumes (neither is Blues for Mr. Charlie) I'm coming back to it now.  I don't have that much to say about it.  In the edition I found, there's … Continue reading The Amen Corner →

This is Baldwin's final novel, and also his longest, by far.  It is a multi-generational saga, the most crucial stage of which unfolds during the 1950's and 60's.  Its narrator Hall Montana reports at the outset he has just lost his brother Arthur, and it sends him into a depression.  Baldwin uses the processing of … Continue reading Just Above My Head →

The Devil Finds Work is the last book-length piece of nonfiction (Baldwin calls it an "essay") that Baldwin wrote, and though it's similar to some earlier pieces in its focus on Baldwin's autobiography, and obviously addresses similar themes, it picks a new point of departure: the movies.  The sweep of this book is captured really well … Continue reading The Devil Finds Work →

When a student told me last year that If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin's 1974 novel which I had not read at the time - was being made into a movie, I was sort of nonplussed.  There were other better choices, I thought (even though I hadn't read this one).  Why not Giovanni's Room … Continue reading If Beale Street Could Talk →

It is not true that people become liars without knowing it.  A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come for them (James Baldwin, No Name In the Street, 1972). This is the best book by James Baldwin … Continue reading No Name in the Street →

Though Baldwin wrote about his own life a lot, Baldwin's 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone seems like the closest he came to writing a full-length autobiography.  It's written in the first person and as his biographer David Leeming notes, a lot of the micro- and macro-level details of protagonist Leo Proudhammer's … Continue reading James Baldwin – Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone →

[I put the James Baldwin reading project on hold for a while, but it's back.] In one of my classes, we just finished an almost quarter-long exploration of Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly.  One of the coolest things about studying this album with my students is that, for whatever reason, kids often share music with … Continue reading Ain’t Nothin’ New – Or – James Baldwin – Blues for Mister Charlie →

"The American situation is very peculiar and it may be without precedent in the world. No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide" (James Baldwin, "White Man's Guilt") One of my earliest James Baldwin reading experiences was "Sonny's Blues," a short story that forms the centerpiece of Going to Meet … Continue reading James Baldwin – Going to Meet the Man and Some Mid-60’s Essays →

The words of "My Dungeon Shook" ring in my ears almost every single day.  Somehow the centerpiece of that ringing is a simple imperative sentence about 3/4 of the way through the final, two-page paragraph: You, don't be afraid. That paragraph, itself, lays out almost every needed inch of the conceptual and emotional terrain needed to make … Continue reading James Baldwin – The Fire Next Time →