Happy Birthday James Baldwin

Today is the birthday of James Baldwin (books by this author), born in Harlem (1924). He grew up poor, the oldest of nine children. He worked at sweatshops as a teen, and gravitated toward books at a young age, spending any free time reading and writing at the public library. He said: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who had ever been alive.” He was also attracted to the language and redemptive imagery of the Bible, and at 16, he preached sermons from the Pentecostal pulpit, attracting larger crowds than his minister father.

When he was 18, he got a job on the New Jersey railroad and later took up in Greenwich Village, where he was befriended by the African-American painter Beauford Delaney. Baldwin said, “He was the first walking living proof for me that a black man could be an artist.” He supported himself doing freelance work, and was beginning to come to terms with his sexuality — but he found the attitude in the U.S. toward blacks and homosexuals to be unbearable. When the writer Richard Wright helped him secure a grant to write abroad, Baldwin moved to Paris and later to Switzerland where he finished his first autobiographical novel about growing up in Harlem, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953). He continued to move between the States and Europe for the next decade, calling himself a commuter rather than an expatriate, breaking new ground in literature with his novels Notes of a Native Son (1956) and Giovanni’s Room (1957), which openly discussed homosexuality.

Although he lived in France, Baldwin’s work was rooted in the American experience. He said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” The Civil Rights movement inspired him to return to the States, where he spoke to audiences and wrote essays on race relations, and in 1956, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the publication of The Fire Next Time. He was devastated by the assassinations of his close friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., and though he was criticized for being out of touch with the times, he returned to France in the ’70s, where he continued to write, publishing two more novels and a final collection of poetry, Jimmy’s Blues (1983).

Baldwin said, “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 but a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”