James Baldwin Popular Books

James Baldwin Biography & Facts

James Arthur Baldwin (né Jones; August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked among the best English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality. Baldwin was a well-known public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.Baldwin's fiction posed fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures. Themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class intertwine to create intricate narratives that run parallel with some of the major political movements toward social change in mid-twentieth century America, such as the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. Baldwin's protagonists are typically but not exclusively African American, with gay and bisexual men featured prominently in his work. His characters often face internal and external obstacles in their search for self- and social acceptance: dynamics prominent in his 1956 novel Giovanni's Room.Baldwin's work continues to influence artists and writers. His unfinished manuscript Remember This House was expanded and adapted as the 2016 documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, winning the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary. His 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk was adapted into a 2018 film of the same name, which earned widespread praise. Early life Birth and family Baldwin was born as James Arthur Jones to Emma Berdis Jones on August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital in New York City. Baldwin was born out of wedlock. Jones never revealed to Baldwin who his biological father was. According to Anna Malaika Tubbs in her account of the mothers of prominent civil rights figures, some rumors stated that James Baldwin's father suffered from drug addiction or that he died, but that in any case, Jones undertook to care for her son as a single mother. A native of Deal Island, Maryland, where she was born in 1903, Emma Jones was one of the many who fled racial segregation in the South during the Great Migration. She arrived in Harlem at 19 years old.In 1927, Jones married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher. David Baldwin was born in Bunkie, Louisiana, and preached in New Orleans, but left the South for Harlem in 1919. How David and Emma met is uncertain, but in James Baldwin's semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, the characters based on the two are introduced by the man's sister, who is a friend of the woman. Emma Baldwin would bear eight children with her husband—George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr. (named for James's father and deceased half-brother), Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Paula—and raise them with her eldest James, who took his stepfather's last name. James rarely wrote or spoke of his mother. When he did, he made clear that he admired and loved her, often through reference to her loving smile.: 20  Baldwin moved several times in his early life but always to different addresses in Harlem. Harlem was still a mixed-race area of the city in the incipient days of the Great Migration; tenements and penury featured equally throughout the urban landscape.David Baldwin was many years Emma's senior; he may have been born before Emancipation in 1863, although James did not know exactly how old his stepfather was. David's mother, Barbara, was born enslaved and lived with the Baldwins in New York before her death when James was seven. David also had a light-skinned half-brother that his mother's erstwhile enslaver had fathered on her, and a sister named Barbara, whom James and others in the family called "Taunty". David's father and James's paternal grandfather had also been born enslaved. David had been married earlier, begetting a daughter, who was as old as Emma when the two were wed, and at least two sons―David, who would die in jail, and Sam, who was eight years James's senior, lived with the Baldwins in New York for a time, and once saved James from drowning.: 7 James referred to his stepfather simply as his "father" throughout his life, but David Sr. and James shared an extremely difficult relationship, nearly rising to physical fights on several occasions.: 18  "They fought because [James] read books, because he liked movies, because he had white friends", all of which, David Baldwin thought, threatened James's "salvation", Baldwin biographer David Adams Leeming wrote. David Baldwin also hated white people and "his devotion to God was mixed with a hope that God would take revenge on them for him", wrote another Baldwin biographer James Campbell. During the 1920s and 1930s, David worked at a soft-drinks bottling factory, though he was eventually laid off from this job, and, as his anger entered his sermons, he became less in demand as a preacher. David Baldwin sometimes took out his anger on his family, and the children became fearful of him, tensions to some degree balanced by the love lavished on them by their mother. David Baldwin grew paranoid near the end of his life. He was committed to a mental asylum in 1943 and died of tuberculosis on July 29 of that year, the same day Emma gave birth to their last child, Paula. James Baldwin, at his mother's urging, had visited his dying stepfather the day before, and came to something of a posthumous reconciliation with him in his essay, "Notes of a Native Son", in which he wrote, "in his outrageously demanding and protective way, he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced like him". David Baldwin's funeral was held on James's 19th birthday, around the same time that the Harlem riot broke out. As the oldest child, James worked part-time from an early age to help support his family. He was molded not only by the difficult relationships in his own household but by the results of poverty and discrimination he saw all around him. As he grew up, friends he sat next to in church would turn away to drugs, crime, or prostitution. In what Tubbs found not only a commentary on his own life but on the Black experience in America, Baldwin once wrote, "I never had a childhood ... I did not have any human identity ... I was born dead." Education and preaching Baldwin wrote comparatively little about events at school. At five years old, Baldwin began school at Public School 24 on 128th Street in Harlem. The principal of the school was Gertrude E. Ayer, the first Black principal in the city, who recognized Baldwin's precocity and encouraged him in his research and writing pursuits, as did some of his teachers, who recognized he had a brilliant mind. Ayer stated that James Baldwin got his writing talent from his mother, whose notes to school were greatly admired by the teachers, and that her son also learned to write like an angel, albeit an avenging one. By fifth grade, not yet a teenager, Baldwin had read some of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's.... Discover the James Baldwin popular books. Find the top 100 most popular James Baldwin books.

Best Seller James Baldwin Books of 2024

  • How We Fight for Our Lives synopsis, comments

    How We Fight for Our Lives

    Saeed Jones

    From awardwinning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Liveswinner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Awardis a “moving, bracingly honest memoir” (The New York Times Book...

  • James Baldwin synopsis, comments

    James Baldwin

    Muzafar Ahmad Bhat

    Born on August 2, 1924, in New York City, James Baldwin published the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, going on to garner acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality and h...

  • Life Will Be the Death of Me synopsis, comments

    Life Will Be the Death of Me

    Chelsea Handler

    #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER  “This will be one of your favorite books of all time. Through her intensely vulnerable, honest, and hilarious reflections, Chelsea shows us more ...

  • Of One Blood synopsis, comments

    Of One Blood

    Pauline Hopkins

    “Mysticism, horror, and racial identity merge fluidly in this thrilling tale of love, obsession, and power” (Publishers Weekly) written by one of the lesserknown literary figures o...

  • The Fire Is upon Us synopsis, comments

    The Fire Is upon Us

    Nicholas Buccola

    "A great read."Whoopi Goldberg, The ViewHow the clash between the civil rights firebrand and the father of modern conservatism continues to illuminate America's racial divideOn Feb...

  • Go Tell It on the Mountain synopsis, comments

    Go Tell It on the Mountain

    James Baldwin

    One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteenyearold boy's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of selfinvention in thi...

  • Another Country synopsis, comments

    Another Country

    James Baldwin

    From one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth centurya novel of sexual, racial, political, artistic passions, set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France. “B...

  • What Truth Sounds Like synopsis, comments

    What Truth Sounds Like

    Michael Eric Dyson

    Named a 2018 Notable Work of Nonfiction by The Washington Post NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner, The 2018 Southern Book Prize NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2018 BY: ...

  • Baldwin for Our Times synopsis, comments

    Baldwin for Our Times

    James Baldwin & Rich Blint

    A collection of James Baldwin's writings that speaks urgently to our current era of racial injustice, with an introduction by prominent Baldwin scholar Rich BlintIn his unforgett...

  • Caste synopsis, comments

    Caste

    Isabel Wilkerson

    #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”Dwight Garner,...

  • The Matter of Black Lives synopsis, comments

    The Matter of Black Lives

    Jelani Cobb & David Remnick

    A collection of The New Yorker‘s groundbreaking writing on race in Americaincluding work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, TaNehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and morewit...

  • The New Iberia Blues synopsis, comments

    The New Iberia Blues

    James Lee Burke

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNamed one of the best crime novels of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review.The shocking death of a young woman leads Detective Dave Robicheaux into the d...

  • Blues for Mister Charlie synopsis, comments

    Blues for Mister Charlie

    James Baldwin

    An awardwinning play from one of America’s most brilliant writers about a murder in a small Southern town, loosely based on the 1955 killing of Emmett Till. "A play with fires of ...

  • The Village synopsis, comments

    The Village

    John Strausbaugh

    Cultural commentator John Strausbaugh's The Village is the first complete history of Greenwich Village, the prodigiously influential and infamous New York City neighborhood. F...

  • James Baldwin and the 1980s synopsis, comments

    James Baldwin and the 1980s

    Joseph Vogel

    By the 1980s, critics and the public alike considered James Baldwin irrelevant. Yet Baldwin remained an important, prolific writer until his death in 1987. Indeed, his work through...

  • Going to Meet the Man synopsis, comments

    Going to Meet the Man

    James Baldwin

    A major collection of short stories by one of America’s most important writersinformed by the knowledge the wounds racism leaves in both its victims and its perpetrators. “If Van ...

  • The Amen Corner synopsis, comments

    The Amen Corner

    James Baldwin

    From one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth centurya masterpiece of the modern American theater: a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and bla...

  • Voices in Our Blood synopsis, comments

    Voices in Our Blood

    Jon Meacham, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker & James Baldwin

    A literary anthology of important and artful interpretations of the civil rights movement and the fight against white supremacy, past and presentincluding pieces by Maya Angel...

  • The Fire Next Time synopsis, comments

    The Fire Next Time

    James Baldwin

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movementin the 1960sand still lights the way to understanding race in America toda...

  • The Tragedy of Brady Sims synopsis, comments

    The Tragedy of Brady Sims

    Ernest J. Gaines

    A courthouse shooting leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whi...

  • The Furious Passage of James Baldwin synopsis, comments

    The Furious Passage of James Baldwin

    Fern Marja Eckman

    A profile of the controversial and iconic James Baldwin told largely in his own words to a prizewinning reporteressentially Baldwin on Baldwin.

  • James Baldwin synopsis, comments

    James Baldwin

    David Leeming

    James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canonGo Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, The ...

  • Reading with Patrick synopsis, comments

    Reading with Patrick

    Michelle Kuo

    “In all of the literature addressing education, race, poverty, and criminal justice, there has been nothing quite like Reading with Patrick.”The AtlanticA memoir of the lifech...

  • The Devil Finds Work synopsis, comments

    The Devil Finds Work

    James Baldwin

    From "the best essayist in this country” (The New York Times Book Review) comes an incisive booklength essay about racism in American movies that challenges the underlying assumpti...

  • Outlaw Marriages synopsis, comments

    Outlaw Marriages

    Rodger Streitmatter

    Celebrate LGBTQIA+ history with the engaging and untold stories of 15 prominent samesex couples who defied cultural norms and made significant contributions to the arts, theater, s...

  • The Portrait of a Lady synopsis, comments

    The Portrait of a Lady

    Henry James & Geoffrey Moore

    When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American is brought to Europe by her wealthy aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to enjoy the fr...

  • The Three Mothers synopsis, comments

    The Three Mothers

    Anna Malaika Tubbs

    New York Times Bestseller“This dynamic blend of biography and manifesto centers on Louise Little, Alberta King, and Berdis Baldwin . . . Tubbs’s book stands against the women’s era...

  • James Baldwin synopsis, comments

    James Baldwin

    William J. Maxwell

    Available in book form for the first time, the FBI's secret dossier on the legendary and controversial writer.Decades before Black Lives Matter returned James Baldwin to prominence...

  • The Gay Revolution synopsis, comments

    The Gay Revolution

    Lillian Faderman

    “This is the history of the gay and lesbian movement that we’ve been waiting for.” The Washington Post The sweeping story of the struggle for gay and lesbian rightsbased on amazing...

  • Notes from the Field synopsis, comments

    Notes from the Field

    Anna Deavere Smith

    "Smith’s powerful style of living journalism uses the collective, cathartic nature of the theater to move us from despair toward hope.” The Village Voice Anna Deavere Smith’s ...

  • I Am Not Your Negro synopsis, comments

    I Am Not Your Negro

    Velvet Films, Inc. & Raoul Peck

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER In his final years, one of America’s greatest writers envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. ...

  • Unseen synopsis, comments

    Unseen

    Dana Canedy, Darcy Eveleigh, Damien Cave & Rachel L. Swarns

    Hundreds of stunning images from Black history have been buried in the New York Times photo archives for decades. Four Times staff members unearth these overlooked photographs and ...

  • If Beale Street Could Talk synopsis, comments

    If Beale Street Could Talk

    James Baldwin

    From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of ...

  • James Baldwin synopsis, comments

    James Baldwin

    Bill Schwarz & Cora Kaplan

    “This fine collection of essays represents an important contribution to the rediscovery of Baldwin’s stature as essayist, novelist, black prophetic political voice, and witness to ...

  • My Soul Looks Back synopsis, comments

    My Soul Looks Back

    Jessica B. Harris

    In this captivating new memoir, awardwinning writer Jessica B. Harris recalls her youth “surrounded by some of the most famous creative minds of the seventies and eighties…James Ba...

  • Robicheaux synopsis, comments

    Robicheaux

    James Lee Burke

    James Lee Burke’s most beloved character, Dave Robicheaux, returns in this New York Times bestselling mystery set in the towns and backwoods of Louisiana: an “enthralling yet grim ...

  • The Bold World synopsis, comments

    The Bold World

    Jodie Patterson

    Inspired by her transgender son, activist Jodie Patterson explores identity, gender, race, and authenticity to tell the reallife story of a family’s history and transformation.“A c...

  • If They Come in the Morning... synopsis, comments

    If They Come in the Morning...

    Angela Y. Davis

    With race and policing once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America’s giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power One of America’s most h...

  • Notes of a Native Son synopsis, comments

    Notes of a Native Son

    James Baldwin

    In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first w...

  • Heads of the Colored People synopsis, comments

    Heads of the Colored People

    Nafissa Thompson-Spires

    Winner of the PEN Open Book Award Winner of the Whiting Award Longlisted for the National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize...

  • The Envy of the World synopsis, comments

    The Envy of the World

    Ellis Cose

    With a compassionate eloquence reminiscent of James Baldwin's Letter to My Nephew, Ellis Cose presents a realistic examination of the challenges facing black men in modern America....