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JAMES BALDWIN SOCIAL COMMENTATOR AND ESSAYIST 1924 - 1987
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JAMES BALDWINSOCIAL COMMENTATOR AND ESSAYIST 1924 - 1987Biographical Background Once described as “the most considerable moral essayist now writing in the United States,”11 James Baldwin was a prolific writer of the mid~20th century. His work included fiction, poetry and drama, as well as political essays. It was as an essayist that he gained the most attention. The frequent topic of his writings was race relations and the struggle for civil rights among African-Americans. His noteworthiness as an American writer is somewhat ironic; he lived most of his adult life in France. However, he did not consider himself an expatriate, instead preferring to think of himself as “a kind of trans-Atlantic commuter.”12 Even though he did live abroad, his impact on the American civil rights movement of the 1960s was profound. In addition to his works on racial matters, Baldwin also wrote about discrimination against homosexuals and was an early critic of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. As a minority within a minority—a black homosexual—Baldwin was able to write insightful, thought-provoking, and controversial essays that challenged traditional social practices and structures. He strongly believed that it was his purpose to question, confront, and probe for the truth. As quoted by biographers Fred Standley and Louis Pratt, Baldwin believed that “real writers question their age.”13 Born in Harlem, New York, Baldwin was the oldest son (out of nine children) of a preacher and was himself also trained as a Pentecostal minister. Many of his biographers believe his religious background had a strong influence on his writing, as evidenced in such books as Go Tell It On the Mountain and The Fire Next Time. Baldwin left home at the age of 17 and tried his hand at various jobs including waiting on tables and writing book reviews. In one collection of his essays, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin explained that he was a writer, even from his earliest childhood days: “I must also confess that I wrote—a great deal—and my first professional triumph, in any case, the first effort of mine to be seen in print, occurred at the age of twelve or thereabouts, when a short story I had written about the Spanish revolution won some sort of prize in an extremely short-lived church newspaper.”14 Philosophical Foundations and Ideas Over the course of his career which spanned four decades, Baldwin’s writing focused on such diverse topics as the indivisibility of the private life and the public life, the essential need to develop sexual and psychological consciousness and identity, and the explosive and destructive state of race relations. His constant examination of the human condition also revealed his belief that there is an indispensable interdependency among individuals, nations, and the world. Baldwin did not think any topic was sacred or beyond the analysis of society. A sampling of his diverse subject matters confirms this belief: American foreign policy, the influence of Christianity on blacks and whites, Third world countries, and the images presented in Hollywood. While Baldwin wrote about a variety of seemingly unrelated topics, the root of his work bad one message: each individual is a worthy and valuable human being. Henry Louis Gates, professor of English and Afro-American Literature at Cornell University, called Baldwin a conscience for black people as well as an entire country.5 Through his writing, Baldwin was able to influence the rhetoric of several civil rights leaders. According to Professor Gates, Baldwin “educated an entire generation of Americans about the civil-rights struggle and the sensibility of Afro-Americans as we faced and conquered the final barriers in our long quest for civil rights.”6 Summary of Selected Works As was noted earlier, Baldwin was a prolific writer, producing a variety of works including novels, essays, plays, and commentaries. The following works are a small sample of the diversity of his writing. From 1955 through 1963 he wrote several essays that contributed to the civil rights movement burgeoning in the South. The first collection of these were presented in Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955. In 1961, the next set of essays was published in Nobody Knows My Name. Baldwin’s third essay book of this period was The Fire Next Time, published in 1963. Baldwin’s first novel was partially autobiographical. Go Tell ft On The Mountain told the story of a minister’s son who grew up poor in Harlem in the 1930s. The novel involves the relationship between the son and his autocratic father who hated him. Baldwin himself considered this book the keystone of his career.” ‘Mountain’ is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else,” be said. “I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father.”7 The book that drew the most criticism was Giovanni s Room, written in 1956. It was derided for its unadulterated view of homosexuality. Criticism Throughout his career, Baldwin attracted much attention—negative as well as positive. One critic claimed that Baldwin celebrated the victimization of African-Americans. According to well-known jazz critic and essayist Stanley Crouch, Baldwin “sanctified the oppressed and elevated victimization in African-American literature.”8 He further criticized Baldwin by saying that be influenced the “cultural nationalists” who “transformed white America into Big Daddy and the Negro movement into an obnoxious, pouting adolescent demanding the car keys.”9 Eldridge Cleaver, a former member of the Black Panther Party, believed that Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country revealed a hatred of blacks. Other critics found fault with Baldwin’s writing style. Some said his style was too halting, others claimed it was too sweeping. Still, others thought he was better at one style of writing than another. For example, poet Langston Hughes once observed, “Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than lames Baldwin. To my way of thinking, he is much better at provoking thought in the essay than he is in arousing emotion in fiction.”10 Conclusion and Summary The writer Randall Kenan eloquently described Baldwin’s place in literary and social philosophy history. He wrote, “More than any other writer of his generation, white or black, gay or straight, man or woman, it would not be an exaggeration to say, James Baldwin exerted a moral hold on the American imagination nonpareil in the annals of this country’s literature and its public debate for nearly four decades, a status clearly in league with that of Emerson and Thoreau and Douglass.”11 Whether one agrees with Baldwin’s assertions or not, all readers of his work can agree that there is one prevalent theme throughout his writing: love. He espoused the need for love among individuals. He pleaded for understanding among people of different backgrounds, based on love of humans. It is from his strong conviction in the power of love that his voice arose and spoke to millions of people to create a better world. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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