San Antonio College Library

This collection offers a generous selection of reviews and essays tracing the critical reputation of James Baldwin. The editors' introduction provides a survey of the principal sources for the study of Baldwin as well as a lucid discussion of key trends in Baldwin criticism and scholarship. Avoiding frequently-anthologized essays, this collection presents fresh and engaging essays on different aspects of Baldwin's multifaceted career. ISBN 0-8161-8879-3:...

Porter focuses on Baldwin's earlier novels and essays (upto 1963), and examines the origins of the writer's thematic and stylistic considerations and traits. He sees Baldwin as influenced most readily by the wrtings of Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry James. Porter also evaluates Baldwin's tricky job of creating fictional art and speaking for social protest simultaneously. ISBN 0-8195-5197-X: $19.95.

James Baldwin, one of the major African American writers of the twentieth century, has been the subject of a substantial body of literary criticism. As a prolific and experimental author with a marginal perspective-a black man during segregation and the Civil Rights era, a homosexual at a time when tolerance toward gays was not common-Baldwin has fascinated readers for over half a century. Yet Baldwin's critics have tended to separate his weighty,...

"Acclaimed author and social critic James Baldwin (1924-1987) maintained that all American literature is intrinsically bound to the nation's social history and that all American writers are products of its political system. In seminal works such as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, and The Fire Next Time, he expresses his profound belief that writers have the power to transform society, to engage the public, and to inspire and channel...

"James Baldwin was newly recognized as the most brilliant black writer of his generation when his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, firmly established his reputation in 1955. No one was more pleased by the book's reception than Baldwin's high school friend Sol Stein. A rising New York editor, novelist, and playwright, Stein had suggested that Baldwin write the book and coaxed his old friend through the long and sometimes agonizing process...

"He was one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary men of letters. Angry, provocative, courageous, James Baldwin wrote with such fierce eloquence about issues of race and sex that his great books - Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time - are now part of the canon of American literature. The literary scholar David Leeming, a friend of Baldwin's for twenty-five years, brings us closer than we have ever...

A literary biography describing the life, friends, and work of the American author.