James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions. Some Baldwin essays are book-length, for instance The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976).Baldwin's novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration of not only blacks, but also of gay and bisexual men, while depicting some internalized obstacles to such individuals' quests for acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, written well before gay equality was widely espoused in America: Giovanni's Room (1956). Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, is said to be his best-known work.
August 2, 1924, Harlem, New York City, New York, United States
Died
December 1, 1987, Saint Paul de Vence, France
Place Of Birth
Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
Profession
Writer, Actor, Miscellaneous Crew
Education
The New School, DeWitt Clinton High School
Nationality
American
Parents
Emma Berdis Jones
Awards
Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada
Nominations
National Book Award for Fiction, National Book Award for Nonfiction, National Book Award for Science, Philosophy, and Religion (Nonfiction), National Book Award for Fiction (Hardcover)
Movies
I Am Not Your Negro, Where the Heart Is, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Star Sign
Leo
#
Quote
1
Our humanity is our burden, our life. We need not battle for it. We need only to do what is infinitely more difficult: that is, accept it.
2
American history is longer, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
3
[observation, 1968] Sidney Poitier, as a black artist and a man, is up against the infantile, furtive sexuality of this country. Both he and Harry Belafonte are sex symbols, though no one dares to admit that, still less use them as any of the Hollywood he-men are used.
4
[on jazz] This music begins on the auction block.
5
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
6
[in the run-up to the 1980 Presidential election] In a couple of days, blacks may be using the vote to outwit the Final Solution.Yes. The Final Solution.No black person can afford to forget that the history of this country is genocidal from where the buffalo once roamed to where our ancestors were slaughtered - from New Orleans to New York, from Birmingham to Boston, and to the Caribbean and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Saigon. Oh yes, let freedom ring.
7
That the western world has forgotten that such a thing as the moral choice exists, my history, my flesh and my soul bear witness.
8
You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way ... people look at reality, then you can change it.
9
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.
10
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
11
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
12
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
13
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
14
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
#
Fact
1
Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 59-61. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.
2
Pictured on a 37¢ USA commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series, issued 23 June 2004.
3
Graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in New York [1941]
Writer
Title
Year
Status
Character
À la place du coeur
1998
novel "If Beale Street Could Talk"
American Playhouse
1985
TV Series novel - 1 episode
Actor
Title
Year
Status
Character
I Heard It Through the Grapevine
1982
Miscellaneous
Title
Year
Status
Character
Bamboozled
2000
quotation "No Name in the Street" used by kind permission of
$15 Million
