James Baldwin

James Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist and playwright, raised in Harlem, who spent much of his adult life in France and Turkey. His essays, collected in Notes of a Native Son and later books, are among the most searching writing on race in America. The Fire Next Time joins a letter to his nephew with a long essay on Christianity, the Nation of Islam and the American racial crisis. He argued that white America's refusal to face its history harmed white as well as Black Americans, and that only honest love could change it.

Key ideas

• America's racial crisis is rooted in white Americans' refusal to face their own history.
• Clinging to innocence about that history is itself a moral failure.
• The 'Negro problem' is really a problem of how white America sees itself.
• Religion, whether Christian or the Nation of Islam, can imprison people as well as console them.
• Love, understood as a demanding and honest commitment, is needed to 'achieve our country'.

Major works

• The Fire Next Time (1963)
• Notes of a Native Son (1955)
• Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
• Giovanni's Room (1956)
• Nobody Knows My Name (1961)
• No Name in the Street (1972)

In the Book corner

• The Fire Next Time 1963 · Beginner
  A short book made of two essays that first appeared in magazines in 1962. The first, “My Dungeon Shook”, is a letter…

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