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.
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
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 him to write. He published his first (largely autobiographical) novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953, which is seen today as one of the great American classics. He frequented the cafés in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and became friends with French and American artists such as Maya Angelou, Marc Chagall, Ella Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, Nina Simone… Unfortunately, Paris was also the scene of his fallout with writer Richard Wright, who, according to Baldwin, had confused his social and artistic responsibilities by reinforcing dangerous stereotypes about Black people in order to sell more books. In 1956 he published Giovanni’s Room, a groundbreaking work for its depiction of homosexuality, which was taboo at the time. In Another Country, a novel published in 1962, he explores interracial relationships, which was another controversial topic at the time. It was his essays on his experience as a black man in America such as Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961), in which he called for human equality, that established him as one of the great American writers and a major figure in the struggle for civil rights. He was drawn back to the US in the sixties, with the development of the civil rights movement, in which he played a significant role. He became close to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and was extremely affected by their assassinations at the end of the 1960s. He moved permanently to France in 1971, to the small village in Provence, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he passed away in 1987 at age 63.
Here are some events and books celebrating the James Baldwin centennial in Paris:
- James Baldwin Media Library to Open in Paris’ 19th arrondissement
- Un recueil inédit pour fêter le centenaire
- Interview with James Baldwin in French
- He was also cited as a major influence by author Jake Lamar, whose interview with FUSAC you can read here. You can also find his book, Another Country, for sale at Bill& Rosa’s Book Room.
- La Maison Baldwin
