collected essays james baldwin

James Baldwin : Collected Essays

• Barnes and Noble
• ?aff=libraryamerica" target="_blank" class="link--black">Bookshop.org

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #201006

ISBN: 978-1-88301152-9 869 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts .

Related Books

Save $15 when you buy both volumes of the Richard Wright edition in a deluxe boxed set.

Native Son exploded on the American literary scene in 1940. The story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in the raw, noisy, crowded slums of Chicago’s South Side, captured the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of black Americans with an unprecedented intensity and vividness. The text printed in this volume restores the changes and cuts—including the replacement of an entire scene—that Wright was forced to make by book club editors who feared offending their readers. The unexpurgated version of Wright’s electrifying novel shows his determination to write honestly about his controversial protagonist. As he wrote in the essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” which accompanies the novel: “I became convinced that if I did not write Bigger as I saw and felt him, I’d be acting out of fear.”

This volume also contains Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today! , published posthumously in 1963, and his collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children , which appeared in 1938. Lawd Today! interweaves news bulletins, songs, exuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the events of one day—February 12—in the life of a black Chicago postal worker. The text for this edition reinstates Wright’s stylistic experiments, and the novel emerges as a far livelier work of the imagination.

Uncle Tom’s Children first brought Wright to national attention when it received the Story Prize for the best work submitted to the Federal Writers’ Project. The characters in these tales struggle to survive the cruelty of racism in the South, as Wright asks “what quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity.” All five stories Wright included in the 1940 second edition are published in this volume, along with his sardonic autobiographical essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.”

Richard Wright was “forged in injustice as a sword is forged,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. With passionate honesty and courage, he confronted the terrible effects of prejudice and intolerance and created works that explore the deepest conflicts of the human heart.

This Library of America edition presents for the first time Wright’s works in the form in which he intended them to be read. The authoritative new texts, based on Wright’s original typescripts and proofs, reveal the full range and power of his achievement as an experimental stylist and as a fiery prophet of the tragic consequences of racism in American society. The volume includes notes on significant changes in Wright’s text and a detailed chronology of his life.

Arnold Rampersad , volume editor, is Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and a member of the Department of English at Stanford University. He has written biographies of Langston Hughes (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), Jackie Robinson, and, most recently, Ralph Ellison.

Richard Wright: Early Works is kept in print by a gift from Charles Ackerman to the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

“With the appearance of the two-volume Richard Wright: Works , published by The Library of America and edited and annotated by Arnold Rampersad, we have a new opportunity to assess Wright’s formidable and lasting contribution to American literature. But this time we have texts intended as the author originally wished them to be read. The works that millions know are, as it turns out, expurged and abbreviated versions of what Wright submitted for publication.” — Charles Johnson, The Chicago Tribune

Buy all three Baldwin volumes and save $42.50.

With such landmark novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room , and the essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time , James Baldwin established himself as the indispensable literary voice of the Civil Rights era, a figure whose prophetic exploration of the racial and sexual fissures in American society challenged and electrified American readers. 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 the champions of “Black Power” and others on the Left, yet too “pessimistic” for many white readers. As a result his final three novels— Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979)—have yet to receive the consideration given his earlier fiction. Now, these late novels, carefully annotated to clarify Baldwin’s many musical and other cultural references, are collected for the first time in a single-volume edition, a companion volume to The Library of America’s Early Novels and Stories .

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone , inspired in part by Baldwin’s unhappy experience collaborating with the Actors Studio for the staging of one of his plays, begins with the sudden heart attack of its thirty-nine-year-old protagonist, the celebrated actor Leo Proudhammer, whose rise to fame from impoverished beginnings in Harlem is recounted as he recuperates. Although wholly fictional, it is a profoundly personal work, as Proudhammer’s conflicted assessment of his life and career mirror Baldwin’s own struggles in the mid-1960s. If Beale Street Could Talk , the only Baldwin novel narrated by a woman, is a love story in which a young couple must weather a false accusation of rape and the predatory misconduct of the police. Baldwin’s final novel, the sprawling Just Above My Head , follows the troubled life and tumultuous times of world-famous gospel singer Arthur Montana; here Baldwin’s continued critical engagement with the African American church and with black music, begun decades earlier with Go Tell It on the Mountain , brings his career full circle.

Darryl Pinckney , editor, is the author of the novel High Cotton (1992) and the critical study Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books , among other publications.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

The stirring and provocative final three novels by the literary voice of the Civil Rights era

“If you wanted a poem,” wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, “you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.” From the life of Chicago’s South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.

“Her formal range,” writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, “is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso.” That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry retains its power to move and surprise.

Elizabeth Alexander , editor of this volume, is the author of four books of poems, most recently American Sublime , and the essay collection The Black Interior. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks. She is a professor at Yale University.

About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

Buy all three Baldwin volumes in a boxed set and save $42.50.

“The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review , “found eloquent expression in [Baldwin’s] novels. His historical importance is indisputable.” 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.

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. 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. 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. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin’s most ambitious novel.

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. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

Toni Morrison , volume editor, was the author of numerous award–winning novels, including Love , Jazz , Song of Solomon , Sula , The Bluest Eye , and Beloved , which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. From 1989 to 2006 she was Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012.

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories is kept in print by a gift from Frank A. Bennack Jr. to the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

“James Baldwin’s gift to our literary tradition is that rarest of treasures, a rhetoric of fiction and the essay that is, at once, Henry Jamesian and King Jamesian.” — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This landmark two-volume anthology chronicles more than thirty tumultuous years in the African American struggle for freedom and equal rights. Here, in brilliant and inspiring dispatches from some of the finest reporters in the history of American journalism, is a panoramic portrait of the fight to overthrow segregation in the United States. Nearly 200 newspaper and magazine reports, book excerpts, and features by 151 writers—David Halberstam, Carl Rowan, Robert Penn Warren, Gordon Parks, Ralph Ellison, and Anne Moody among them—provide vivid firsthand accounts of all the revolutionary events: the rising activism of the 1940s; the Brown decision; the Montgomery bus boycott; Little Rock; the sit-in movement and Freedom Rides; Birmingham, the March on Washington (August 28, 1963), Freedom Summer, and Selma; and the emergence of “Black Power.”

Each volume contains a detailed chronology of the civil rights movement, biographical profiles of the journalists, notes, an index, and thirty-two pages of photographs, many never before published.

The advisory board for Reporting Civil Rights includes Clayborne Carson , senior editor, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. ; David J. Garrow , Presidential Distinguished Professor, Emory University; Bill Kovach , chairman, Committee of Concerned Journalists; and Carol Polsgrove , professor of journalism, Indiana University.

“If only civil rights were taught this way in our classrooms! Personal narratives, together with gripping newspaper accounts and essays written between 1941 and 1973, make the two-volume Reporting Civil Rights a vital national resource.”— O: The Oprah Magazine

Collected Essays

By james baldwin.

• ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5.0 (1 rating) ·
• 49 Want to read
• 1 Currently reading
• 4 Have read

Preview Book

My Reading Lists:

Use this Work

Create a new list

My book notes.

My private notes about this edition:

Check nearby libraries

• Library.link

Buy this book

Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual, James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the postwar era, and one of the greatest African-American writers of this century. A self-described "transatlantic commuter" who spent much of his life in France, Baldwin joined a cosmopolitan sophistication to a fierce engagement with social issues.

Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political.

The classic The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of America's racial divide, and an impassioned call to "end the racial nightmare...and change the history of the world." The later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era.

A further thirty-six essaysnine of them previously uncollected - include some of Baldwin's earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.

Previews available in: English

Showing 3 featured editions. View all 29 editions?

Add another edition?

Book Details

Table of contents, edition notes, classifications, the physical object, source records, work description.

Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays examines topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society, and offers personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.

Community Reviews (0)

• Created April 1, 2008
• 23 revisions

Wikipedia citation

Copy and paste this code into your Wikipedia page. Need help?