Happy Birthday James Baldwin

It's the birthday of writer James Baldwin born in Harlem Hospital in New York City (1924). He was the oldest of a family of nine children, and he was often put in charge of his younger siblings. He spent much of his childhood with a baby in one hand and a book in the other, reading and rereading Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities.

 Baldwin was accepted into a prestigious, mostly white high school, and while he was encouraged by the intellectual atmosphere of the school, he realized he would never have the same opportunities as his classmates. He said, "When the school day was over, I went back into a condition which [my classmates] could not imagine, and I knew, no matter what anybody said, that the future I faced was not the future they faced."

After graduation, Baldwin took a job working on a construction project for the Army. He experienced racism on the job and was fired several times for insubordination. He decided that his only chance at a better life would be to leave his family and become a writer. He said: "I had to leave Harlem. I had to leave because I understood very well, in some part of myself, that I would never be able to fit in anywhere unless I jumped. I knew I had to jump then."

He moved to Greenwich Village, supporting himself as a dishwasher and a waiter. He had some success publishing book reviews, but he was struggling to write his first novel. He used what money he had left to buy a ticket to Paris.

Baldwin arrived in Paris with only fifty dollars in his pocket. A few days after his arrival, he was locked out of his hotel room for lack of payment. He sold his clothes and his typewriter in order to survive, and then was falsely arrested for stealing a bedsheet and thrown in a French prison. Baldwin said, "It seemed to me that my flight from home was the cruelest trick I had ever played on myself, since it had led me here, down to a lower point than any I could ever in my life have imagined — lower, far, than anything I had seen in that Harlem which I had so hated and so loved."

After he got out of prison, he had almost given up on the novel he'd been writing for years, but a friend set him up in a cottage in the French countryside. Writing in almost total isolation, Baldwin was able to finish the novel in a few months. It came out in 1953 as Go Tell It on the Mountain. It was a big success, and Baldwin went on to become one of the most renowned writers of his generation. The Writer's Almanac