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The Essential James Baldwin

He wrote with the kind of clarity that was as comforting as it was chastising. Here’s where to start.

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By Robert Jones Jr.

Robert Jones Jr. is the author of the novel “The Prophets.”

• Feb. 28, 2024

James Baldwin would have turned 100 on Aug. 2 this year. His final works were published almost 40 years ago, just two years before his death in 1987 . Yet his writing is as imperative as ever. He wrote with the kind of moral vision that was as comforting as it was chastising — almost surely the influence of the pulpit he once occupied as a child preacher in his native Harlem.

Baldwin never went to college, but he read, by his own count, every book in the library . Remarkably, he never received any of the major literary awards. But he wrote with grace and aplomb across genre: essay, novel, short story, song, children’s literature, drama, poetry and, infamously, screenplay. I say infamously because he was hired to write the script for a Malcolm X biopic, which he did reluctantly. Hollywood made it into a documentary instead and then never released it , leaving Baldwin to publish it himself in book form, as “ One Day When I Was Lost .”

Few people are as eloquent with the pen as Baldwin was. He returned again and again to central themes: compassion, radical honesty, and his insistence that we “ grow up .” Even after leaving the United States for France in the 1940s, hoping to escape the pervasive anti-Blackness he had experienced and witnessed, he was a fierce observer of race and culture in America. There is as much spiritual intensity as academic rigor in his books, along with a sense that he was trying to capture something as large as life with his words. That wrestling manifested itself in the length of some of his sentences ( one totals 321 words ). He sacrificed nothing — not style, not substance, not clarity, not beauty, not wisdom — except brevity.

All of his writing — no matter how pointed, critical or angry — is imbued with love. As someone who understood that love is key to liberation, he committed himself to the herculean task of persuading the rest of us. In the documentary short “ Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris ,” he says: “Love has never been a popular movement and no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together — really it is held together — by the love and the passion of a very few people.”

But alongside his deep affection for humanity was the abiding despair that attends when someone has decided to be a particular kind of witness, that is to say a prophet, which Baldwin certainly was — not because he could foretell the future, but because as an enormously astute observer of human behavior, he could make connections that escaped everyone else. As he said so sublimely in his 1972 memoir, “ No Name in the Street ”: “Every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”

Baldwin’s sexuality and the role it played in his writing are too often overlooked or minimized. Existing at this intersection of identities blessed him with empathy and nuanced insight. He described it simply: “I loved a few women, I loved a few men. That was what saved my life.” But he never truly identified as bisexual, homosexual, gay or queer because he thought it was bizarre to distinguish those realities from more socially acceptable ones.

He also felt that the American movement for gay rights contained the same biases against Black people as those in mainstream society. “I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger unexpectedly,” he told The Village Voice in 1984. “Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept Black people than anywhere else in society.”

Today, you can find Baldwin’s words emblazoned on T-shirts, painted on murals and plastered across social media. Even divorced from their greater context, they still hold tremendous weight. I am forever linked to Baldwin, and not only because of his profound influence on my work. Thanks to my former Twitter alias, “ Son of Baldwin ,” something I said on the site back in 2015 will likely always be misattributed to him and I don’t mind. After all, he’s given me more than I could ever hope to repay.

Above all else, Baldwin’s work is a mirror — for the things we don’t want to see about ourselves, but also for our potential. Maybe I’m a cynic, but I sense we will never live up to the standards he hoped we would. But he, ever the optimist, even within his own grief, truly believed we could.

Where should I begin?

“Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) is Baldwin’s first novel. It is a semi-autobiographical account of a young man named John, his family, his friends, his neighborhood, his church and the Black American journey from the South to the North known as the Great Migration. Nearly biblical in its tenor, it is a kind of gospel. The novel is interspersed with the lyrics and music of Black Christian traditions and reaches a fever pitch during the final section of the book, “The Thrashing Floor.” That’s where Baldwin is describing what it looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like when someone catches the Holy Ghost. Here, he accomplishes the literary equivalent of speaking in tongues. The language is extraordinary:

Ah, down! — and to what purpose, where? To the bottom of the sea, the bowels of the earth, to the heart of the fiery furnace? Into a dungeon deeper than Hell, into a madness louder than the grave? What trumpet sound would awaken him, what hand would lift him up? For he knew, as he was struck again, and screamed again, his throat like burning ashes, and as he turned again, his body hanging from him like a useless weight, a heavy, rotting carcass, that if he were not lifted, he would never rise.”

I’ve heard people describe this novel as strange. I think what they were responding to was its covert queerness. John and his teenage friend and fellow parishioner, Elisha, never do anything overtly sexual, but the heat between them radiates off the pages; and their desperation to touch each other (which they do under the guise of play-fighting) and be near each other is palpable, electric and radiant. This novel opens the door for readers to understand the kind of writer Baldwin would become as well as the experiences that shaped his craft.

I’d like a groundbreaking love story

Nearly 70 years ago, Baldwin wrote a novel about a romance between two men. That might not seem like such a big deal now, but then, it was practically unheard of.

“Giovanni’s Room” (1956) takes place in Paris during the 1950s and details the story of an American expatriate named David, who meets Giovanni, an Italian bartender, at a gay bar. The two become friends and, eventually, lovers. But there’s a problem: David has a girlfriend. What is both beautiful and agonizing about the story is how the reader is forced to contend with David’s deep insecurities. He is attracted to Giovanni, but despises Giovanni (and himself) for it.

In characteristically thought-provoking precision, Baldwin links misogyny and anti-queerness. David’s hatred of feminine qualities in men and Giovanni’s hatred of women mirror each other, and expose how David’s self-loathing impacts his relationship to women and Giovanni’s misogynist views mask his own self-hatred. The more sharply their paths diverge, the more they intersect. And as we are led to a heart-shattering conclusion where David must choose between Giovanni and his girlfriend, Hella, and Giovanni faces life-threatening consequences, we are left to wonder which of their fates is worse — or if they are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.

I want something that will rattle my soul

“The Fire Next Time” (1963) is probably Baldwin’s most popular book. It begins with a letter written to his nephew James, in which Baldwin implores his namesake not to believe any of the negative things white supremacists have to say about him; that what they say about him actually reveals what they really feel about themselves. “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your humanity but to their inhumanity and fear,” he wrote.

In the book’s more substantive essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter From a Region in My Mind,” he turns his critical eye on Christianity and sits down in conversation with Elijah Muhammad, then the leader of the Nation of Islam. He reflects on these encounters and concludes that ultimately, religion serves as a divisive force — that it invests human beings with false senses of superiority, that white people’s hostilities and Black people’s resentments of those hostilities will perhaps lead to race wars and possibly the destruction of the nation. “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, more loving,” he writes. “If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him.”

For Baldwin, the only thing that might help us avoid these dire fates is love. Not the romantic or commercial kind, but the radical kind in which folks are called upon to really love their neighbors, by which Baldwin meant through actions, not feelings. And his assessment comes, in the final pages, as a warning, as a clarion call that, still to this day, reverberates off the walls and rattles the soul.

Give me something short, but powerful

Along with “The Fire Next Time” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) is one of Baldwin’s best-known works. It is a short story that details the relationship between two brothers in Harlem: an unnamed teacher who narrates the story, and a jazz pianist named Sonny. Both are war veterans (Baldwin never says which conflict), and one brother struggles with addiction, while the other tries to figure out why. But the story isn’t merely a safari through the miseries and fleeting moments of reprieve in Black people’s lives. That may be the backdrop, but in the foreground Baldwin explains to us, in ways that are wholly astonishing, the nature of music itself.

It’s not just that he writes what is probably the most accurate description of what music can sound like. He illustrates where it comes from and what it feels like. The narrator shares his thoughts while in a nightclub to see Sonny and his bandmates perform for the first time.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air.

The story is filled with other sounds: street gospel, bluesy jukeboxes and whistling children. It’s one of those classics where you come for the lyrics, but stay for the beat.

I’d like a prescient work of fiction

“If Beale Street Could Talk” (1974) was the first novel by Baldwin to be adapted into a major motion picture . And it’s easy to see why. Though it was written and is set in the 1970s, its themes regarding the troubled relationship between Black people and the police are, unfortunately, timeless. Its plot could as easily be a headline in 2024 as 50 years ago.

This is the story of Tish and Fonny, two young Black people who fall in love, and who are violently separated when Fonny is falsely accused of rape. Even when describing the novel’s most harrowing aspects, Baldwin always puts love front and center. Tish, the main narrator, tells the reader early on, “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.” That one sentence might be the novel’s thesis statement as Baldwin navigates the havoc that a carceral system wreaks on families, how it steals time and touch, and how love is likely the only thing that can withstand such an assault.

What’s most frightening about this story is the casual way in which Baldwin conveys the injustice: It seems routine for a Black man to be falsely accused, and for society to be eager to find him guilty of a crime he didn’t commit. It’s all very heavy but feels very contemporary, which suggests that society has not evolved as much as it may think it has. The story’s ending, which mirrors our current circumstances, is proof. Baldwin was masterly at giving voice to that melancholy, but never without some kind of gesture toward the light.

What is his most underrated book?

In the essay collection “The Devil Finds Work” (1976), Baldwin recalls his lifelong love affair with movies, critically analyzing both contemporary films and those of his childhood. He discusses his first impressions of actors like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, his suspicion of a kind of gangster archetype (as played by actors like Humphrey Bogart), Hollywood’s propensity for white savior narratives and stereotypical depictions of Black people and his own run-in with the Hollywood machine. All the while, he weaves in comparisons to literary classics by Faulkner, Shakespeare and others.

The standout pieces include a biting analysis of “The Defiant Ones,” about two escaped prisoners, and a sympathetic evaluation of the Billie Holiday biopic “Lady Sings the Blues,” which he initially detested. But the pièce de résistance is his review of “The Exorcist.” Baldwin was one of the few critics at the time who was not wowed by the film. He outlines how he and a friend went to see it at his friend’s insistence, after hearing all the national hype about people vomiting, passing out and running from the screenings. None of this impresses Baldwin. He puts it bluntly: “The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in ‘The Exorcist’ is the most terrifying thing about the film.” He continues, “Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any Black man, and not only Blacks, many, many others, including white children, can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the Devil recognizes the Devil when they meet.”

“The Devil Finds Work” is an exhilarating and underrated exemplar of cultural criticism.

Show me an example of how the past informs the present

“The Evidence of Things Not Seen” (1985) chronicles Baldwin’s agonizing trip to Atlanta to report on the Atlanta child murders , where two dozen children, mostly Black boys, were taken by a serial killer between 1979 and 1981.

I’m not certain how many people remember this underexamined blemish on the nation’s skin, but as a Black child alive during this era, I was petrified, thinking that I would be snatched up any minute, even though I lived hundreds of miles from the scenes of the crimes.

“Evidence” is not a hard-nosed, true-crime assessment, nor does it try to glamorize its subject. Instead, what these heinous acts opened up for Baldwin was his ability to look critically at the history that led the nation to these moments: the human condition, the condition of the human heart and the pathologies that render Black people, especially Black children, worthless in the country’s imagination. He saw no difference between the Atlanta child murders (and the country’s response to them) and the murder of Emmett Till, and viewed them as an outcome of racism endemic to America. He felt this even though Wayne Williams, a Black man, was eventually convicted of the killings. The general feeling of the Black people who spoke to Baldwin was that white people “win when a Black person can” kill Black children.

Baldwin found Williams to be a bizarre character, though. And he felt the investigation and trial were rushed, incomplete and haphazard at best. At worst, they were just further attempts to pin a crime, any crime, on the nearest Black patsy. And yet — he couldn’t be Baldwin unless he was able to do this — he remained committed as ever to the idea that if there was any place in the world where true liberation from oppression was possible, it would be in America.

His final analysis, to no surprise, rests on the power of love. If only we dared to love ourselves and one another enough to bring it to fruition.

Get to Know the Literary Greats

Expand your literary knowledge of some of the world’s most accomplished authors with our essential guides to their work..

James Baldwin: He   wrote with the kind of clarity that was as comforting as it was chastising. His writing — pointed, critical, angry — is imbued with love. Here’s where to start  with his works.

Henry James: A patron saint of exquisite verbosity, James made a career examining the clash of American innocence with European cunning. Here are his best works .

Larry McMurtry: A wildly prolific son of Texas, the novelist was a tangle of contradictions. This guide can help you navigate his bulging bibliography .

Vladimir Nabokov: Clever and dexterous, the author’s writing delights in puzzles, puns and lepidoptera. Here’s where to start .

J.M. Coetzee: His spare, icily precise books explore humanity’s most serious themes, including South Africa’s legacy of apartheid. And not all of them are downers .

Ursula K. Le Guin: Her powerful imagination turned hypothetical elsewheres into vivid worlds governed by forces of nature, technology, gender, race and class a far cry from our own. Here’s where to dive in .

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10 James Baldwin Books to Read in Your Lifetime

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From Go Tell It on the Mountain to Giovanni's Room and If Beale Street Could Talk , which was adapted for the big screen in 2019, we've gathered some of Baldwin's most popular texts, all of which are still essential reading today. And don't worry: we've included a complete list of his life's work, too—because they're all worthy of praise.

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Go Tell It on the Mountain

In his first novel, Baldwin penned a semi-autobiographical story about a boy named John Grimes, a teen growing up in 1930s Harlem who struggles with self-identity as the stepson of a strict Pentecostal minister. The story mirrors the author's own life; Baldwin too was raised by a stepfather who served as a Baptist pastor. " Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else,'' he told T he New York Times in 1985. ''I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father."

Notes of a Native Son

In this collection of essays, the writer captured the complexities of being Black in America during the first rumblings of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. Throughout his observations, Baldwin both lamented the injustices in the African American community and showed empathy for the oppressor, establishing himself as a key voice in the movement. In a 1958 New York Times review of Notes of a Native Son, African American poet Langston Hughes said this of Baldwin's words: "America and the world might as well have a major contemporary commentator."

Giovanni's Room

A landmark novel in American literature, Giovanni's Room follows an American man living in Paris who struggles with understanding his sexuality as he deals with the societal pressures of masculinity—all as he begins an affair with an Italian bartender named Giovanni. The book, which is widely considered essential reading in the LGBTQ community, was a finalist for the National Book Awards' fiction category in 1957.

Nobody Knows My Name

In another collection of 23 culturally reflective essays, Baldwin highlights the complexity of discriminatory tensions in our society with words that are still just as poignant and relevant today. A selection of Baldwin's new and revised works, many of the titles originally appeared in publications like Esquire and The New York Times Magazine . The essays earned him another spot as a finalist in the National Book Awards in 1962—this time in the nonfiction category.

Another Country

Set in New York City's Greenwich Village in the 1950s, Another Country explores themes of mental health, interracial relationships, love, and bisexuality as the story follows the lives of a group of friends in the wake of a suicide.

After its release, many critics had mixed responses, with Paul Goodman for the New York Times writing that while the story was "personal, sinuous yet definite" it was also "strained [and] sometimes journalistic or noisy." He did, however, acknowledge that his harsher review was a result of Baldwin's previous work, which caused a higher standard of criticism.

The Fire Next Time

Comprised of two essays that were originally published in The New Yorker —"My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation" and "Down At The Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind"—in The Fire Next Time , Baldwin explains the place of both race and racism in society, while also examining and criticizing Christianity's role in American beliefs. At the time, critics saw this collection as a way for white Americans to (finally) get a look inside what life was like as a Black citizen in this country.

Going to Meet the Man: Stories

A collection of eight short stories, this book delves into yet another set of cultural themes through its varied characters: a struggling jazz musician, an angry father, and a racist cop to name a few. Popular titles included are Sonny's Blues; This Morning, This Evening, So Soon; and The Man Child.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

In this Baldwin novel, a fictional noted actor Leo Proudhammer nearly dies after suffering from a heart attack on stage. Throughout the rest of the novel, he reflects on the events of his life—both those that led him to fame and those that revealed his weaknesses.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Now a Golden Globe-nominated film directed by Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk follows young couple Fonny and Tish as they deal with the trial and jailing of Fonny, who is falsely accused of rape. In the big-screen version, the title characters are played by up-and-comers Stephan James and Kiki Layne. When speaking to The Atlantic about what led him to take the story to the big screen, Jenkins said, "Baldwin had a few voices that he wrote in, and one of those voices was just deeply sensual, innately in touch with human emotions... I think this book is the perfect fusion of the more essayistic protest novel and somebody who deeply believed in sensuality and love."

I Am Not Your Negro

In the years before his death, Baldwin envisioned a book about his friends Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers—but never finished it. By combining an unpublished manuscript called Remember This House and varied excerpts from Baldwin's book, notes, interviews, and letters, Raul Peck edited and published the story that the literary great never got to see come to life. Peck also directed the 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary of the same name.

A Complete List of James Baldwin Works

Essays A Talk to Teachers Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son No Name in the Street Notes o f a Native Son The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings The Devil Finds Work The Evidence of Things Not Found The Price of the Ticket

Novels Another Country Giovanni's Room Go Tell It on the Mountain If Beale Street Could Talk Just Above My Head Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Plays Blues for Mister Charlie The Amen Corner Poems Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems Short Stories Come Out the Wilderness Going to Meet the Man Previous Condition Sonny's Blues This Morning, This Evening, So Soon The Man Child The Outing The Rockpile

McKenzie Jean-Philippe is the editorial assistant at OprahMag.com covering pop culture, TV, movies, celebrity, and lifestyle. She loves a great Oprah viral moment and all things Netflix—but come summertime, Big Brother has her heart. On a day off you'll find her curled up with a new juicy romance novel.

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The 19 best James Baldwin books, ranked by Goodreads reviewers

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• James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an American writer and activist.
• He wrote critical essays and classic works of fiction that illuminate racism in America.
• We used Goodreads to determine the 19 most popular James Baldwin books.

James Baldwin was an American writer and activist known for his passions about race, sexuality, and class in America. A key voice in the Civil Rights and gay liberation movements, Baldwin's work reveals criticisms of racism that prevailed in nearly all facets of society, from relationships to politics to cinema. No matter the medium, his work is regarded as honest, insightful, and passionate. 

We used Goodreads rankings to determine the most popular James Baldwin books. With over 125 million members, Goodreads members can rate and review their favorite works . Whether you're looking to read Baldwin's searing essay collections and powerful novels or explore his insightful plays and poetry, here are some of his best works. 

Learn more about how Insider Reviews tests and researches books.

The 19 best James Baldwin books, according to Goodreads members:

19. "nothing personal".

Available on Amazon and Bookshop  

"Nothing Personal" is a Baldwin essay collection about American society during the Civil Rights movement, published in 1964. In his writing, Baldwin questions society's racial fixations, recounts a disturbing police encounter, and ponders upon race in America — highlighting issues that share stark similarities to the current Black Lives Matter movement.

18. "Little Man, Little Man"

Available on Amazon and Bookshop

This children's picture book is about a four-year-old boy named TJ who grows up in Harlem and becomes a "little man" as he discovers the realities of the adult world. With a foreward from Baldwin's nephew, TJ, this childrens' book celebrates Black childhood while also highlighting the challenging realities that sometimes accompany it.

17. "The Amen Corner"

Highlighting the importance of religion and the effects of poverty on one African American family, "The Amen Corner" is a play about Margaret Alexander, a church pastor in Harlem, whose dying husband returns after a long absence. As the truth of their pasts come to light, Margaret risks losing her congregation and her family.

16. "Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems"

This is the most prominent collection of James Baldwin's poetry, from his earliest writing to the words written just before his passing. Enlightened and honest, Baldwin's lyrical and dramatic poetry is just as profound as his fiction and essays.

15. "The Devil Finds Work"

"The Devil Finds Work" is a critical essay collection on racism in cinema, from the movies Baldwin saw as a child to the underlying racist messages in the most popular films of the 1970s. Intertwining personal history with cinematic interpretations, these essays are a crucial commentary and analysis of subliminal messaging, racial disconnect, and racial weaponization in film.

14. "Blues for Mister Charlie"

Loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, "Blues for Mister Charlie" is a play about a Black man who is murdered by a white man in a small town, launching a complex weave of consequences that reveal the lasting wounds of racism. Beloved for Baldwin's gentle writing about harsh subjects, this play stands as an indictment of racism and a demonstration of its violence. 

13. "Just Above My Head"

"Just Above My Head" was the last novel James Baldwin published before his passing in 1987. The story centers on Arthur Hall, a gospel singer, but is about a group of friends who begin preaching and singing in Harlem churches and spans 30 years as they travel, fall in love, and experience the Civil Rights movement.

12. "Dark Days"

Available on Amazon  

This essay collection features three prominent Baldwin essays where he draws upon personal experience to critique racist institutions and how they dismantle equal opportunities for education and democracy. With a firm voice that is still relevant today, Baldwin highlights the effects from all systems on what it means to be Black in America. 

11. "No Name in the Street"

Published in 1972, "No Name in the Street" is an essay collection in which Baldwin recounts historical events that shaped his childhood and understanding of race in society. From Baldwin's reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to his experience of the 1963 March on Washington, his essays are an eloquent but powerful prophetic account of history.

10. "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone"

This Baldwin novel is about an actor named Leo Proudhammer who has a heart attack while performing on stage. Switching between Leo's childhood in Harlem and his acting career, the novel traverses each of Leo's relationships while examining the effects of trauma on individuals.

9. "Nobody Knows My Name"

"Nobody Knows My Name" is James Baldwin's second essay collection, a classic compilation of writings on race in America and autobiographical accounts of Baldwin's experiences. This collection was a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Awards in 1962, admired for Baldwin's "unflinching honesty."  

8. "I Am Not Your Negro"

Available on Amazon and  Bookshop

"I Am Not Your Negro" is a posthumous collection of James Baldwin's notes, essays, and letters edited by Raoul Peck that were first used to create the 2016 documentary of the same name. Based on an unfinished manuscript from James Baldwin about the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., this book is a powerful project to celebrate Baldwin's work.

7. "Going to Meet the Man"

This book is a short story collection featuring men and women who struggle through the lasting effects of racism in their lives. A demonstration of Baldwin's mastery of prose, these stories are passionate as the characters use art, religion, and sexuality to celebrate life and find peace through suffering.

6. "Notes of a Native Son"

"Notes of a Native Son" is James Baldwin's first essay collection, a revered classic featuring 10 essays on the topic of race in America and Europe. From critiques of popular books and movies to examinations of race in Harlem, this collection is loved for Baldwin's astute and eloquent insights into the world and how his experiences fit into a larger picture.

5. "Another Country"

Controversial at the time of publication for depictions of bisexuality and interracial couples, this 1962 classic centers on Rufus Scott, a Black man living in 1950s Greenwich Village. When Rufus meets a white woman and falls in love, society openly condemns their relationship, which deeply affects both of them.

4. "If Beale Street Could Talk"

This classic follows Tish, a 19-year-old woman, who is in love with a young sculptor named Fonny. When Fonny is wrongly accused of a crime and sent to prison, both of their families set out on an emotional journey to prove his innocence. 

3. "Go Tell It on the Mountain"

Available on Amazon and  Bookshop  

"Go Tell It on the Mountain" is James Baldwin's first publication, a semi-autobiographical novel about John, a teenager in 1930s Harlem. With themes of self-identity and realization, holiness, and mortality, this book is about John's self-invention and understanding his identity in the context of his family and community.

2. "Giovanni's Room"

With over 80,000 ratings on Goodreads, "Giovanni's Room" is the most-rated James Baldwin book amongst Goodreads members. Baldwin's second novel is considered a gay literature classic, the story of an American man in Paris who is caught between morality and desire when he meets an alluring man named Giovanni.

1. "The Fire Next Time"

Both a call to action and a searing attack on racism, "The Fire Next Time" is an essay collection featuring two letters — one to Americans and the other two his nephew — as a call to end racism 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. These letters are more direct than his fictional writing, making it a compelling classic of thoughtful and persistent reflections, and the most popular James Baldwin book on Goodreads.

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James Baldwin spoke eloquently to his era. Does he speak to ours?

In our present racial crisis, the words of the writer and essayist James Baldwin have reemerged and become ubiquitous in American public discourse. Baldwin’s writings, sometimes shorn of context, are now quoted endlessly on social media and have been prominently displayed during protests against police brutality. Documentary filmmakers and feature film directors, including Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins, have mined his work for their craft. The noted writer and theater critic Hinton Als has curated a multimedia art exhibit dedicated to a complex representation of his life and persona. In addition, Baldwin’s queerness — his status as a gay black man — seems to invest his words with a special prescience for us.

Baldwin achieved the height of his fame in the middle of the 1960s, when the novelist and former boy preacher’s beautiful and evocative words seemed to capture the stakes of the black freedom movement like nothing else — particularly for white liberals. It is that prophetic aspect of Baldwin that Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chairman of Princeton’s African American studies department, seeks to recover in his book “ Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own .” The strength of Glaude’s book depends on how well he makes the case that Baldwin speaks directly to our times.

“Begin Again” is, in fact, two different books. The first takes the reader on a deeply researched tour of Baldwin’s essays and actions from the mid-1960s forward. Glaude wants to rescue Baldwin’s legacy from many critics who contend that his art and insightfulness declined once he became an international icon and felt the need to speak for black America. Indeed, Baldwin’s novels and essays from the late ’60s on often received tepid or negative reviews. He sympathized with the emerging black power movement but endured withering, homophobic criticism from figures like Eldridge Cleaver.

Glaude defends Baldwin and argues that the writer was asking what one should do during what Glaude calls the “after times” — moments when our society attempts to redeem itself from its racial past, even as that past reasserts itself, often violently. Glaude contends that, beginning with the 1963 terrorist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls, Baldwin used his profound disillusionment with the recalcitrance of white Americans to explore the ethical question of what one should do and say in the after times.

Glaude argues that the after times forced a change in the nature of Baldwin’s “we.” Rather than asking how we Americans should grapple with our collective past and present, he began asking how a different we — nonwhite Americans — should act in a country that embraces what Glaude calls “the lie.” The lie is the national myth of America as “fundamentally good and innocent,” which allows the nation “to avoid facing the truth about its unjust treatment of black people and how it deforms the soul of the country.” Baldwin’s response to the lie was to “bear witness,” as Glaude terms it — to “tell the story.” “Make it real for those who refuse to believe that such a thing can happen/has happened/is happening here.” Bearing witness, Glaude argues, requires us to follow Baldwin in embracing a complex retelling of American history, for which we must travel a critical distance from the disappointments at home (Baldwin spent much of his later life in France).

We must ultimately “begin again,” Glaude concludes, taking his book title from a passage in Baldwin’s last novel. Glaude argues that America has faced “two critical moments of moral reckoning” — Reconstruction and the civil rights era — and that now we must pursue a third. His penetrating book does an excellent job of defending the power and beauty of Baldwin’s later intellectual projects and explicating them for scholars and lay readers alike, quoting extensively (as one must) from Baldwin’s words for full effect.

But Glaude also has a second project, which is to join in the recent trend of repurposing Baldwin for the present, prompted by “the election of Donald Trump and the ugliness that consumed my country.” Glaude freely admits that “in 2016, I could not bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton” given the failure of the Democratic Party to adopt policies specifically targeted at black Americans. Indeed, he went further and urged black voters to leave their ballots blank, although he later partly modified his stance. “I was stupid enough,” he confesses, “to overestimate white America.”

“Begin Again” represents Glaude’s personal coming to grips with that grave error of judgment. As such, it contains moments of profound insight, such as his visit to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Ala., where he describes himself standing in the center of the museum, where “sounds and sights bleed from one exhibit into the next.” There, Glaude can simultaneously hear the voices of civil rights leaders and segregationists, freedom songs and screams of brutalized anti-racist protesters. “It is the cacophonous song of America,” he writes, implicitly invoking Walt Whitman — the national story, told without the lie.

Yet, Glaude also claims that Baldwin’s experience with his own after times can be analogized to our troubled era. If Baldwin grappled with an American lie that denied the disruptive claims of the black freedom movement, what exactly is the disruption in the American story that prompted the rise of the figure who spurred the writing of this book? Trump, of course, came to political prominence by attacking the legitimacy of the most visible black life in America — that of the nation’s first black president. But Glaude seems to deny any significance to the election and tenure of Barack Obama, largely because he did not enact Glaude’s preferred public policies. Indeed, he curtly dismisses Obama in biting asides sprinkled throughout the book — an odd choice given that Baldwin’s moral power derived in part from his ability to find common ground between ’60s-era black figures who sometimes launched vitriolic attacks against one another.

Of course, it would be foolhardy to expect an American president to reject the core national narrative, even a false one, but at the same time there seems to be a gaping absence in this book. If we are in the after times, then what was the before? “Begin Again” is a groundbreaking and informative guide to Baldwin and his era, even as it remains an uncertain map of our own.

Begin Again

James baldwin's america and its urgent lessons for our own.

By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Crown. 239 pp. $27

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Begin Again by Eddie S Glaude Jr review – the US through James Baldwin's eyes

The ‘white problem’ ... Baldwin’s writings spark a timely and absorbing engagement with American history

I n 2018, two years after the “disastrous” 2016 US presidential election, Eddie Glaude Jr, professor of African American Studies at Princeton, made a pilgrimage to the house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence , in the south of France, where James Baldwin had lived for almost two decades, and which was now being knocked down to make way for luxury flats. Glaude, who has taught Baldwin for many years, had come in search of any surviving traces of the writer’s refuge, and found most of it crumbling to dust. Only the writing room remained, “exposed for the sun to beat down on its side”. Against the backdrop of bulldozers and the noise of sledgehammers, it “looked like the excavation of an ancient ruin”, and called to mind “what Baldwin saw in the latter part of his life in the United States … decay and wreckage alongside greed and selfishness”. It became the impetus for Glaude to undertake an excavation of his own.

He resolved to engage deeply with Baldwin’s work, to try to think “with” him, in order to interrogate “how an insidious view of race, in the form of Trumpism, continues to frustrate any effort to ‘achieve our country’”, and then to write about it. The result is Begin Again, a book that is perfect for Baldwin aficionados or anyone experiencing staggering disbelief at America’s state of disarray and trying to make sense of it. What sets this account apart is that Glaude understands how Baldwin’s writing becomes a pathway for one’s own thoughts; he’s able to synthesise the novelist’s work in a way that transcends summation or homage and becomes instead an act of breathtaking literary assimilation that acquires its own generative power.

Early on, he quotes Baldwin’s 1963 speech at Howard University: “It is the responsibility of the Negro writer to excavate the real history of this country … We must tell the truth till we can no longer bear it.” Baldwin took his own exhortation seriously, producing, according to Glaude, nearly 7,000 pages of writing distinguished by its astute, unflinching elegance, including Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963) – which established him as the literary consciousness of the African American resistance at a critical moment in the country’s history. Glaude tracks an argument that originates in Baldwin’s 1964 essay “The White Problem”: “The idea of America is an outright lie” that has fostered a state of wilful blindness, involving not only a refusal to acknowledge that the US was founded on notions of white supremacy, but an interrelated insistence on the innocence of white Americans.

Merging his own thoughts with Baldwin’s, Glaude posits that the reason for America’s troubles since the arrival of the first group of enslaved Africans has been its unwillingness to confront this lie: “any attempt” to do so “would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are”. Instead of facing the truth about the genocidal horrors of its past, Americans pine for “national rituals of expiation”. Thus, in the wake of any attempt to expose it, the lie always moves “quickly to reassert itself”, prolonging a long practice of historical gaslighting.

For Glaude, two previous turning points in American history – first, the civil war and reconstruction, and second, the black freedom struggle of the mid 20th century, both attempted to grapple with the lie, and were the occasions of “betrayal”. Barack Obama ’s election to the presidency represented another turning point, but hopes were “betrayed”, just as the civil rights movement was betrayed by the turn towards Reaganism. Now, the US faces another “moment of moral reckoning”, the chance to “choose whether it will become a genuinely multiracial democracy”, and Glaude suggests it should look to Baldwin’s “navigation of his own disappointments” for guidance.

He traces how the brutal response to the freedom struggle – in particular the murders of Medgar Evers , Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr – led to a shift in Baldwin’s thinking, a recognition of the need to eschew “ the burden of having to save white people first”. Glaude concludes that the answer now is the same as it was then: the urgent need to “rid ourselves of the idea of white America”, which is the only way to get off the “goddam racial hamster wheel”. And he suggests that the first step involves what he called in his previous book Democracy in Black a “revolution of value”: “This involves telling ourselves the truth about what we have done … It requires centering a set of values that holds every human being sacred.”

In form, Begin Again is an essayistic marvel, circling and folding back on itself as Baldwin’s musings in the past and Glaude’s analysis of the present give meaning to each other. For example, Baldwin’s understanding that we had to get “beyond” colour (misread by some as “boot-licking” self-hatred) leads to a discourse on modern identity politics through his contention that “categories can cut us off from the complexity of the world, and the complexity of ourselves”, before coming back to the idea that we must tell the truth about who we are. Glaude’s style works the same way Baldwin’s did, achieving the kind of mimetic evocation of a mind at work that Montaigne described as “la peinture de la pensée” (the painting of thought), except that here we get two great minds for the price of one.

In the US, the book was published in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. In the UK, it was released just after armed pro-Trump rioters staged the attack on the US Capitol, in the wake of which “the lie” was still everywhere in evidence, particularly the loud condemnatory chorus crying out: “This is not who we are! This is not America!” It’s a persistent, predictable refrain, but as always it only raises the question: if it isn’t America, why does it keep happening there? Glaude’s attempt to answer this, via Baldwin, points to a way for his country to “imagine ourselves anew”. It is a scholarly, deeply personal, and yet immensely readable meditation, a masterful reckoning with the “latest betrayal” of the American ideal.

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