Reading the Black Intellectual: James Baldwin

“Not every thing that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced…” James Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987) was an essayist, playwright and novelist. In 1962 an article appeared in the New Yorker magazine entitled “Letter From a Region in My Mind.” This article would form the basis of his seminal work The Fire Next Time, published later that year. In1963 Sheldon Binn, reviewing the book in the New York Times, described it as a masterful attempt to translate what it means to be a Negro in white America.

Baldwin started writing Another Country (1962) in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. He completed the book in Istanbul as a result of a grant he received from the Ford Foundation.

Go Tell it on the Mountain is Baldwin’s earliest and most autobiographical work. It is defined by Baldwin’s painful relationship with his stepfather, David, a disciplinarian preacher from New Orleans who repeatedly told his stepson that he was ugly, marked by the devil. The novel addresses the issue of systemic racism.

Join us for coffee and conversation about this important work. Click here for questions to consider