With the novelGo Tell It on the Mountain(1953), a distillation of
his own experiences as a preacher's son in 1930s Harlem, and the
essay collectionNotes of a Native Son(1955),James
Baldwin(1924-1987)established himself as a prophetic voice of his
era. Some such voices may grow fainter with the passage of time,
but Baldwin remains an inescapable presence, not only a chronicler
of his epoch but a thinker who helped shape it.
Toni Morrison, volume editor, is the author of a number of
award-winning novels, including Love, Jazz, Beloved, Song of
Solomon, Sula, and The Bluest Eye. She was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1993.
“James Baldwin’s gift to our literary tradition is that rarest of treasures, a rhetoric of fiction and the essay that is, at once, Henry Jamesian and King Jamesian.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
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