Jour: 2 août 2024

James Baldwin was born on August 2 1924 in Harlem, New York, to a young single mother who later married a minister. He found refuge in reading books at the public library and started writing at a young age. Despite a fraught relationship with his stepfather, Baldwin followed in his footsteps and was a preacher for three years (a period that he describes as formative in Go Tell It on the Mountain) and took odd jobs to support himself, his siblings and mother. He eventually moved to Greenwich Village where he worked as a freelance writer and met Richard Wright, who helped him get a grant that would support him. He started getting essays published in national periodicals around this time. Baldwin was unhappy in New York, where he felt like his identity as a black gay man would not be accepted. In 1948, at age 24, he moved to Paris on another grant and found that France provided reprieve from the discrimination that he had felt in the United States, making it possible for hi…