James Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem on the second of August 1924, the eldest of nine children of David Baldwin, a Pentecostal lay preacher, and Berdis Jones. He preached in storefront churches by fifteen, left the pulpit at seventeen, and went to Paris in 1948 at the age of twenty-four to write — and to escape an American racial environment he had concluded was killing him.

He produced, over the next forty years, the most consequential body of essayistic prose in twentieth-century American letters. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his first novel, restored the language of Black Pentecostal Christianity to literary fiction. Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963) — particularly the latter's open letter to his nephew on the centenary of Emancipation — established him as the moral voice of mid-century American letters across racial lines.

He debated William F. Buckley at the Cambridge Union in 1965 on the proposition that "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro." The motion carried 540 to 160. The debate is now studied in every university course on twentieth-century American rhetoric.

He continued to write fiction, essays, and screenplays from his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France through the 1970s and 1980s. His final published work, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), examined the Atlanta child murders.

He died at home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence on the first of December 1987, age sixty-three.

He is honored here as the essayist who set the moral terms of American writing on race.