James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories (LOA #97) by
Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin's reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin's own experience, of a preacher's son coming of age in 1930's Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as "an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us." Giovanni's Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America's racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin's most ambitious novel. Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin's short fiction, including the masterful "Sonny's Blues," the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer- "For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness." LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Giovanni’s Room
Another Country
Going to Meet the Man
The Rockpile
The Outing
The Man Child
Previous Condition
Sonny’s Blues
This Morning, This Evening, So Soon
Come Out the Wilderness
Going to Meet the Man
James Baldwin: Collected Essays (LOA #98) by
Toni Morrison's definitive edition of James Baldwin's incomparable nonfiction. Contains all the major essays collections in their entirety, plus 36 uncollected essays. James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not Your Negro." Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America's Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction ever published. With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, Baldwin fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as "The Harlem Ghetto," "Everybody's Protest Novel," "Many Thousands Gone," and "Stranger in the Village." Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political. The classic The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of America's racial divide and an impassioned call to "end the racial nightmare...and change the history of the world." The later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era and include his remarkable works of film criticism. A further 36 essays--nine of them previously uncollected--include some of Baldwin's earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Notes of a Native Son
Autobiographical Notes
Everybody’s Protest Novel
Many Thousands Gone
Carmen Jones: The Dark is Light Enough
The Harlem Ghetto
Journey to Atlanta
Notes of a Native Son
Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown
A Question of Identity
Equal in Paris
Stranger in the Village
Nobody Knows My Name
The Discovery of What it Means To Be an American
Princes and Powers
Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem
East River, Downtown: Postscript to a Letter from Harlem
A Fly in Buttermilk
Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South
Faulkner and Desegregation
In Search of a Majority
Notes for a Hypothetical Novel
The Male Prison
The Northern Protestant
Alas, Poor Richard
The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy
The Fire Next Time
My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew
Down At the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind
No Name in the Street
The Devil Finds Work
Other Essays
Smaller than Life
History as Nightmare
The Image of the Negro
Lockridge: ‘The American Myth’
Preservation of Innocence
The Negro at Home and Abroad
The Crusade of Indignation
Sermons and Blues
On Catfish Row: Porgy and Bess in the Movies
They Can’t Turn Back
The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King
The New Lost Generation
The Creative Process
Color
A Talk to Teachers
“This Nettle, Danger…”
Nothing Personal
Words of a Native Son
The American Dream and the American Negro
On the Painter Beauford Delaney
The White Man’s Guilt
A Report from Occupied Territory
Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White
White Racism or World Community
Sweet Lorraine
How One Black Man Came to Be an American
An Open Letter to Mr. Carter
Last of the Great Masters
Every Good-bye Ain’t Gone
If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What is?
Open Letter to the Born Again
Dark Days
Notes on the House of Bondage
Introduction to Notes of a Native Son, 1984
Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood
The Price of the Ticket