baldwin collected essays

Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays

James baldwin , toni morrison  ( editor ).

869 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

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James Baldwin

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"Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words "acceptance" and "integration." There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it."

"The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."

"To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and if I can respect this, both of us can live. Neither of us, truly, can live without the other: a statement which would not sound so banal if one were not so endlessly compelled to repeat it, and act on that belief. "For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. The devil has no need of any dogma—though he can use them all—nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do."

"' Be careful what you set your heart upon ,' someone once said to me, ' for it will surely be yours. ' Well, I had said that I was going to be a writer, God, Satan, and Mississippi not-withstanding, and that color did not matter, and that I was going to be free. And, here I was, left only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me. These essays are a very small part of a private logbook. The question of color takes up much space in these pages, but the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self."

"To be an Afro-American, or an American black, is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise way honorably defend--which they were compelled, indeed, endlessly to attack and condemn --and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life. Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspect of it, and some of the people in it. A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving because it is so blind: it is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction. I think black people have always felt this about America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come."

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Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays examines topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society, and offers personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.

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Notes of a Native Son

43 pages • 1 hour read

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Notes of a Native Son is a collection of nonfiction essays by James Baldwin . Baldwin originally published the essays individually in various literary and cultural commentary magazines between 1948 and 1955. The Beacon Press first republished the essays as Notes of a Native Son in 1955. This study guide refers to the 2012 Beacon Press edition of Notes of a Native Son . Citations to page numbers, however, come from the volume The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 , published by St. Martin’s/Marek in 1985 (hardback first edition), which includes all of the essays curated in Notes of a Native Son .

With the publication of Notes of a Native Son , along with his first novel Go Tell It on The Mountain , Baldwin catapulted into the national spotlight as a major literary figure. His rise coincided with the emergence of White liberal support for civil rights, and the White press came to see him as one of the leading voices of Black America. As this White support for civil rights waned by the beginning of the 1970s, Baldwin was deemed no longer relevant by the mainstream society, while Black readers would become more devoted to his later work.

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Notes of a Native Son established Baldwin as a major essayist. All of his essays amount to meditations on race and reflections on slavery’s ongoing repercussions for human connection today. He offers these meditations by discussing the most mundane things that everyone can relate to—death, love, family, popular culture, fear, and desire. Baldwin’s essays closely connect to his own lived experience—which was both typical and atypical for a Black person in mid-twentieth century America. He grew up poor in Harlem, exposed to many of the cultural institutions central to that historic Black neighborhood in New York City. He also had an inimitable talent and drive for writing about the human condition as he experienced it. This led him to travel to Paris to find his way as a writer. While most Black people were not able to go this route, Baldwin was following a path laid out by Black writers and artists in the generations immediately preceding his. The New Negro Movement of the 1920s was also known as the Harlem Renaissance because Harlem was in many ways the cultural epicenter of this major development in Black history.

In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin criticizes Uncle Tom’s Cabin , coining it as a “protest novel,” a uniquely American literary genre . While the intention of the genre is to help the oppressed, he believes the novel perpetuates the agenda of White liberals using stock characters that don’t accurately portray the experiences of slaves as complex human beings. Baldwin explores another novel of this genre, Native Son , in “Many Thousands Gone.” The title of the essay references the deaths of thousands of slaves, and Baldwin argues that the novel, and society, refuses to move past slavery, and the Black community alienates Black people who try to overcome segregation.

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In “Carmen Jones: The Dark is Light Enough,” Baldwin criticizes the musical film Carmen Jones , which took the plot from the opera Carmen and gave it an all-Black cast. Baldwin points out that the American public tends to sexualize the Black body, and the film doesn’t better the opera’s message. He also notes that the actors are all very light-skinned, making them “light enough” for Hollywood.

In “The Harlem Ghetto,” Baldwin portrays his neighborhood in New York City, along with the racial oppression therein, and he considers that interracial understanding might be possible. In “Journey to Atlanta,” he tells the story of his brother’s quartet, The Melodeers , whom the Progressive Party sponsored, but then abandoned in Atlanta. Baldwin points out the party’s attempt to gain the favor of Black voters, though they had no interest in helping the Black community.  

“Notes of a Native Son” discusses Baldwin’s father’s life history and death, their strained relationship, and the generational pain that caused his father to be distant from his family. “Encounter on the Seine,” centers on the interactions between Black Americans, White Americans, Black Africans, and Black American entertainers in Paris. Baldwin suggests that Black Americans, displaced by slavery, have no heritage or roots as do Europeans. In “A Question of Identity,” Baldwin posits that Americans’ sense of time, understanding of society’s limitations, and skewed concept of freedom, leave American students in Europe without a sense of identity.

“Equal in Paris” tells the story of Baldwin’s arrest for using a friend’s bedsheet, which the friend had stolen from a hotel. Baldwin notes that his jailers were no better or worse than their American counterparts. In “Stranger in the Village,” Baldwin relates how the people of a Swiss village, who had never seen a Black person, treated him as a novelty—they did not intend to be unkind, as a contemporary White American might, but their reactions were dehumanizing. 

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Collected essays

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Baldwin: Collected Essays: One of Two Volume Collection (Library of America) by Baldwin, James A. (1998) Hardcover Unknown Binding

• Language English
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