Centennial Birthday: James Baldwin
Born August 2, 1924, Harlem, NY | Died December 1, 1987, St. Paul de Vence, France
Today we launch The Essayist’s Calendar, a new feature of the Best American Essays Newsletter, on the auspicious occasion of the centennial of James Baldwin’s birthday. Subscribe to our newsletter for news about upcoming online conversations with Best American Essays contributors about essayists.
“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”
“I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, ‘Look.’ I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, ‘Look again,” which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.”
First published essay: “Maxim Gorki as Artist,” The Nation, April 12, 1947. A review.
Selected Nonfiction Bibliography:
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985 (St. Martin’s Press, 1985; rpt. by Beacon Press, 2021).
James Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. by Toni Morrison (The Library of America, 1998).
“Notes of a Native Son” (first published in Harper's Magazine, 1955; collected in Notes of a Native Son, 1955), in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates & Robert Atwan (Mariner Books, 2001).
Essays by James Baldwin listed in Notables, The Best American Essays:
"Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood," Playboy, listed as Notable in The Best American Essays 1986; this essay was later retitled "Here Be Dragons" and reprinted in The Price of the Ticket (Beacon Press, 2021).
"To Crush the Serpent," Playboy, listed as Notable in The Best American Essays 1988. This was Baldwin’s last essay published in the periodical literature.
See also:
By Ed Pavlić (contributor to The Best American Essays 2024):
"James Baldwin's Day of Mourning," Boston Review, December 2023
"Baldwin's Lonely Country," Boston Review, March 2018
"Come On Up, Sweetheart. James Baldwin's Letters to His Brother," Boston Review, October 2015
Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners? (Fordham University Press, 2015)
“Welcome to the Errordome: Are Editors Still Afraid of James Baldwin?” PEN America, 2014
By Teju Cole (contributor to The Best American Essays 2024):
“Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village’,” The New Yorker, August 2014
By Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (contributor to The Best American Essays 2017):
“The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin,” BuzzFeed, February 2016
By Ishion Hutchinson:
“Unbending Progress,” Agni, 97, 2023; listed as Notable in The Best American Essays 2024
Year of James Baldwin website: For the centennial of Baldwin’s birth, the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation, in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Education, Philosophy, and Religion Department and The Black Writers Museum host a website celebrating Baldwin’s literary, philosophical, cultural, artistic, and ideological genius and his contributions to the revolutionary remaking of world humanity.
Listen to James Baldwin read his work in this Library of Congress recording.
Watch the PBS documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (1989).