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James BaldwinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
James Baldwin was a key figure of the civil rights movement, as well as an essayist, novelist, playwright, and poet. He is known for his work’s social criticism and its role exposing truths about racism and anti-gay bias in America. He was born August 2, 1924, in New York City, the oldest of nine children. Baldwin and his siblings grew up in poverty in Harlem, an upbringing that not only heightened his observational skills but also his ability to provide honest and heartfelt commentary on social class in America. While attending Frederick Douglass Junior High School, one of his teachers and mentors was Countee Cullen, who was also a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. With this kind of tutelage, Baldwin began to write and edit for the local school literary magazine called Magpie (“An Introduction to James Baldwin.” National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian).
Though he was never a teacher in an official capacity, he spent his formative years (between age 14 and 17) as a preacher at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. Preaching helped him develop an idiosyncratic rhetorical style that blended reflection, revitalization, and activism, and infused his writing with biblical and mythological metaphors, allusions, themes, and symbols.
By James Baldwin
Another Country
James Baldwin
Blues for Mister Charlie
James Baldwin
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin
Going To Meet The Man
James Baldwin
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin
I Am Not Your Negro
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If Beale Street Could Talk
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If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?
James Baldwin
Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son
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No Name in the Street
James Baldwin
Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin
Sonny's Blues
James Baldwin
Stranger in the Village
James Baldwin
The Amen Corner
James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin
The Rockpile
James Baldwin