James Baldwin was an African-American novelist, short story writer,
and essayist, known for his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain. Most
of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th
century United States. His novels are notable for the personal way
in which they explore questions of identity as well as for the way
in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related
to being black and homosexual, well before the social, cultural
or political equality of these groups could be assumed.
Baldwin
was born in New York's Harlem neighborhood in 1924, the first
of his mother's nine children. He never met his biological father
and may never have even known the man's identity. Instead, he
considered his stepfather, David Baldwin, his only father figure.
David, a factory worker and a store-front preacher, was allegedly
very cruel at home, which the young Baldwin hated. While his father
opposed his literary aspirations, Baldwin found support from a
white teacher as well from the mayor of New York City, Fiorello
H. LaGuardia.
His
most important source of support, however, came from his idol
Richard Wright, whom he called "the greatest black writer
in the world for me". Wright and Baldwin became friends for
a short time and Wright helped him to secure the Eugene F. Saxon
Memorial Award. Indeed, Baldwin titled a collection of essays
Notes of a Native Son, in clear reference to Wright's enraged
and despairing novel Native Son. However, Baldwin's 1949 essay
"Everybody's Protest Novel" ended the two authors' friendship
because Baldwin asserted that Wright's novel Native Son, like
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, lacked credible characters
and psychological complexity.
Baldwin,
like many American authors of the time, left to live in Europe
for an extended period of time beginning in 1948. His first destination
was Paris where he followed in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway,
Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, and many
others. When Baldwin returned to America, he became actively involved
in the Civil Rights Movement. He marched with Martin Luther King,
Jr. to Washington, D.C.
During
the early 1980s, Baldwin was on the faculty of the Five Colleges
in Western Massachusetts. While there, he mentored Mount Holyoke
College future playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who won the Pulitzer
Prize for Drama in 2002. Baldwin died of cancer in 1987 at the
age of 63.
Quotes
"The
price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate
knowledge of its ugly side."
"I
love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly
for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."
"All
of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee."
"People
pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed
themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the
lives they lead."
"Artists
are here to disturb the peace."
"Everything
depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last
drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give."
"Ignorance,
allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
"All
roles are dangerous. The world tends to trap you in the role you
play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking
distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one
actually is."
"Life
is more important than art, that's what makes art important." |
