In the following essay, Shin and Judson analyze the change in Baldwin's presentation of homosexuality between Giovanni's Room and Just Above My Head.

In the following essay, O'Neale "explores the complexities of Baldwin's concepts of fatherhood and how they impinge on his search—for a sympathetic Father/God—an odyssey that he deliberately identifies as the collective historic experience of the race and its artists."

In the following interview, Baldwin discusses his relationships, his writing, other writers, and America.

In the following review, Als presents an overview of Baldwin's life and career.

In the following essay, Rohy analyzes how the questions of origin and identity in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room relate to the concepts of passing and nostalgia.

In the following essay, Gates traces the course of Baldwin's thought and importance throughout his career.

James Baldwin has made a reputation by exploiting social paradoxes, so it should not be surprising to trace his literary antecedents to neither Richard Wright nor Harriet B. Stowe, but to that Brahmin, Henry James…. The amphibian elegance of [Baldwin's] syntax comes naturally to an artist obsessed by dualities, paradox. The Atlantic Ocean separated James's mind into opposed hemispheres, and the gulf of color so cleaves Baldwin. The antipodes of their worlds propose a dialectical art. (p...

The fact that [Baldwin] equated playwriting with improving a troubled world [as he did in an observation made in high school] explains his theory of drama quite clearly. It may also explain why he is not a better playwright and why he has not written more plays. While the theatre brings the most immediate response for the propagandist; it also brings adverse criticism…. It is perhaps vital to note that although he used similar theses and argued the same points in his fiction and in his plays, he used...

Chinua Achebe is a novelist whose works include Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah. In the following essay, he asserts the value of James Baldwin's legacy.

In the world of "Sonny's Blues," the short story by James Baldwin, the author deals with man's need to find his identity in a hostile society and, in a social situation which invites fatalistic compliance, his ability to understand himself through artistic creation which is both individual and communal. "Sonny's Blues" is the story of a boy's growth to adulthood at a place, the Harlem ghetto, where it's easier to remain a "cunning child,&...

The continuing battle which Baldwin has waged with the spirit of Richard Wright, a battle which started in 1949 with the publication of his essay, 'Everybody's Protest Novel', is symptomatic of that tension which he was later to see, more sympathetically, in [Langston] Hughes's poetry. As evidence of this tension within his own work on the one hand he admits to a determinism not essentially different from Wright's and admits that 'we cannot escape our origins, howev...

A decade ago James Baldwin, more than any other author, seemed to liberal white Americans to personify as well as to articulate the outrage and anguish of black Americans struggling to put an end to racial oppression and to achieve their civil and human rights…. Though as Northern as Martin Luther King was Southern, James Baldwin preached a more secular and apocalyptic but not really dissimilar sermon: the redemptive force of the love of a prophetic, interracial few could, even at that late date, yet...

In his famous essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel," published in Partisan Review in 1949, when he was only twenty-four, Baldwin announced his determination to reject the pattern of protest that a Negro writer in America was expected to follow. Instead of depicting the black man as "merely a member of a Society or a Group" who has been condemned by the white oppressors to poverty and ignorance, Baldwin chose to understand him as "something resolutely indefinable, unpre...

Moralistic fervor, a high literary seriousness, the authority of the survivor, of the witness—these qualities made Baldwin unique. In his best work, he is drawn to the ways in which life can go wildly wrong, to examinations of the damage done the individual by society. Another bloodied stone is always waiting to be turned over. A sense of mission has guided Baldwin's development as a writer. He was truly born with his subject matter, and yet for a long time his work showed a feeling of distrus...

It is Baldwin's sentimental and poorly argued attempt to present homosexuality as some form of superior erotic enlightenment that continually slackens the power of Just Above My Head. The sentimentality results from a tendency to overstatement, pretension, and pomposity, as well as the creation of situations and responses the sole function of which is to prove the degradation of black people at the behest of racism and sexual convention. The degradation is wrought with existential cliches to demonstr...

It isn't hard to see why James Baldwin in particular has chosen to shape his sixth novel along the lines of a saga in the contemporary mode. His fiction has often been attacked, notably by younger black writers in the 1960's, as too personal, too patently a working-out of inner conflict at the price of distorting the realities of race and racial conflict in America…. It may well be that "Just Above My Head" is Baldwin's attempt to answer such criticism. The novel ta...

[The direction Blues for Mr. Charlie] takes is an expression of the will of one of the characters, Richard's father, who searches for the meaning of [his son's] murder for himself, for his son, and for the man who committed it…. [Richard] is rich with anger, and yet in the very first scene with his father, he surrenders to him the pistol he has brought back with him from the North, an act for which he will in the end have to pay with his life.

Baldwin has come to represent for "white" Americans the eloquent, indignant prophet of an oppressed people, a voice speaking … in an all but desperate, final effort to bring us out of what he calls our innocence before it is (if it is not already) too late. This voice calls us to our immediate duty for the sake of our own humanity as well as our own safety. It demands that we stop regarding the Negro as an abstraction, an invisible man; that we begin to recognize each Negro in his �...

Of all the well-known novelists of the day, James Baldwin is among the warmest, the most companionable, the least ironic. So many contemporary writers seem incapable of presenting loyalty, innocence or happiness, especially family happiness, but Baldwin inhabits these feelings with great naturalness and intensity. He can show, as he does more than once in Just Above My Head, parents and children exchanging gifts at Christmas or during a reunion. The family members have tears in their eyes, not of regret but...

The particular social condition Baldwin diagnoses in his essays is the same one that makes the creation of a fictional world virtually impossible for a Negro novelist. His essays subtly explore the ambiguities and ironies of a life lived on two levels—that of the Negro, and that of the man—and they have spoken eloquently to and for a whole generation. But Baldwin's feelings about the condition—alternating moods of sadness and bitterness—are best expressed in the paradoxes ...

["Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone"] is a simpleminded, one-dimensional novel with mostly cardboard characters, a polemical rather than narrative tone, weak invention, and poor selection of incident. Individual scenes have people talking too much for what the author has to say and crucial events are "told" by one character to another rather than created. The construction of the novel is theatrical, tidily nailed into a predictable form. It becomes clearer with each b...

James Baldwin's screenplay adaptation of [The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with Alex Haley] now published as One Day When I Was Lost, is no substitute for the original. Unfortunately, it is not much worth reading at all, except for those who have a special interest in Baldwin's career and its curious downward spiral during the last years. What ever has happened to him, anyway? He seems to have become increasingly isolated from America and its problems, perhaps even from himself, during ...

[Just Above My Head is] a melancholy piece of creation. Swollen …, meandering, awkwardly colloquial, and pretentiously elevated by turns, the book agitatedly contains four or five major themes that never are brought into coherence with one another. Dealing with experiences that clearly have meant a great deal to Baldwin, it is a novel stuck halfway between life and art, with none of the originality or fatefulness of either. The mélange of themes I mentioned includes family relationships, relig...

Mr. Baldwin [in "Nobody Knows My Name"] proves to be a steady and exact observer of himself and of others. He also qualifies eminently as a person for whom our society has not troubled to provide an identifying niche. In evidence of this, it is enough to say that he couples an uncomfortably acute intelligence with a measure of personal pride and that he is a Negro. For convenience, we might divide Mr. Baldwin's essays into two heaps. The larger heap will contain his observations on a nu...

A "protest play," unfortunately, always has a hard time of it artistically, and even more so if, like Baldwin, the playwright doth protest too much. And not only too much but too much too soon. Right at the outset [of Blues for Mister Charlie] we are clobbered with a tirade which is an inflammatory inventory of all the injustices toward the Negro, and, justified as these grievances are, they strike a false note: … Baldwin would shudder at the thought of having written a pop-art play. Bu...

Swollen (655 pages), meandering, awkwardly colloquial, and pretentiously elevated by turns, [Just Above My Head] agitatedly contains four or five major themes that never are brought into coherence with one another. Dealing with experiences that clearly have meant a great deal to Baldwin, it is a novel stuck halfway between life and art, with none of the originality or fatefulness of either. The mélange of themes I mentioned includes family relationships, religious passion and its repudiation, homosex...

Just Above My Head is a large work which concerns itself with many things and treats each of them with great reverence. There are no ready-made formulas for drama here. The images and voices of this book come so completely to life that, once submerged, the reader might expect to come across one of the characters or places on the streets of his own world. At the onset one is led to believe that Hall Montana, the omniscient narrator, is about to embark on a self-cleansing confessional rendering of the life an...

I envy whoever writes of James Baldwin a century from now. That his work will then be discussed I have no doubt, since of all writers in English of our era his style is most classic, his theme one of the most relevant. But it is because of this theme, precisely, that it is so hard to criticize his writing now. Baldwin's essential theme is life-death-passion-honor-beauty-horror … the perpetual theme since the Greeks and long before, the only one worthy of a great artist and of which, as writer ...

No one today excels James Baldwin in the writing of invective. His art is nourished and sustained by an unquenchable rage. He is, essentially, a prophet, with a prophet's ear for the cadences of desolation. Those cadences inform his long new novel, Just Above My Head, which is principally concerned with the life and times of a gospel singer named Arthur Montana…. Arthur is a homosexual, like his creator. He finds himself doubly alienated from American society: for most of his short life he is ...

To transcend the sterile categories of "Negro-ness," whether those enforced by the white world or those erected defensively by Negroes, became Baldwin's central concern as a writer. He wanted, as he says in "Nobody Knows My Name," his brilliant new collection of essays, "to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer."… Freedom cannot always be willed into existence; and that is why, as Baldwin went on to write two acco...

The stories in [Going to Meet the Man] add nothing to Mr. Baldwin's stature, nor do they diminish it by much. Five have appeared in print before; the other three are new and, for the most part, disappointing. Taken as a whole, the book traces the author's progress from "The Rockpile" and "The Outing," halting first steps toward the first novel, to his most recent work, which suffers from its journalistic conception. With the possible exception of the first two, all ...

In many of his earlier novels James Baldwin showed that he … was a distinguished craftsman. But in Just Above My Head, though he reverts to the fruitful matter of his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, the phenomenon of American black evangelical Christianity, he has lost the touch he showed there and in Giovanni's Room…. [The] plot, if there is one, has no focus.

Composed mostly in flashback, [Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone] follows Proudhammer through a bitter Harlem childhood, the birth of ambition toward the stage, a long love affair with a white actress, a homosexual love alongside that, the beginning of political awareness, a step toward identification with his people's new militancy. A half-dozen themes, none of which is realized, none brought to any conclusion in the imagination, they exist almost as mutually exclusive, as though in sett...

[Despite Baldwin's] absorption in culture's complexities and conundrums, despite his indictments of racism, his deepest impulses are religious, mythological and romantic. Certain themes emerge again and again in his work: that race does not exist, finally, except in a moral dimension; that we are one another's history and thus cannot abuse one another without abusing ourselves; that salvation and damnation are real, and depend upon our ability or our failure to love. Race and sex are th...

Nothing Personal pretends to be a ruthless indictment of contemporary America, but the people likely to buy this extravagant volume are the subscribers to fashion magazines, while the moralistic authors of the work are themselves pretty fashionable, affluent, and chic…. Baldwin's attacks are significant less for their familiar content than for the conditioned response they are expected to provoke in the reader—and, especially, for the format in which they appear. But lending himself to ...

Mr. Baldwin is a preacher and a rhapsodist. "Blues for Mister Charlie" is an angry sermon and a pain-wracked lament. It draws together the humiliation, degradation, frustration and resentment felt by millions relegated to second-class citizenship and transmutes the accumulated bitterness into a roar of fury. Listen attentively to Mr. Baldwin if you want to know the Negro who now is emerging from behind the noncommittal mask. Mr. Baldwin is not quite so good with the white man. His fearful, unr...

Baldwin's language from his first writings has been distinguished. Precise, well-ordered, very sophisticated, it could describe extreme experiences with chill casualness, and apparently trivial experiences with a simple but effective use of extreme language that conveyed the underlying importance of the apparently trivial…. The material of Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is not sensational in itself. In a particular and important way, violence is ever present and very important i...

Baldwin is so experienced an essayist, and Hall Montana so convenient an observer, that Hall's rhetorical social commentary takes an unwanted precedence over the story of Arthur Montana [in Just Above My Head]…. Arthur's life never seems as vivid as Hall's, though clearly the younger brother is meant to be the novel's hero. Nor does Julia Miller, the child preacher who must suffer incest and the fathomless guilt of matricide, ever seem a real person until she becomes a sta...

[One has] the feeling that Malcolm X's life and death do not furnish the best vehicle by which even an immensely talented writer can express in cinematic terms the problems of race in America today. And finally one wonders if Baldwin himself was right to accept this particular job. In his recent prose works his evangelical fervour has been meshed with a marvellous, high style reminiscent of the masters of Rye, Sussex, and Oxford, Mississippi and seeming more natural to him than Harlem, Argot. The ups...

[Nobody Knows My Name] is confirmation that James Baldwin is one of America's finest writers. The essays are uneven; some are slight and dated already because of their subject, some simply deserve more thought than Baldwin has devoted to them. But in this book and in his earlier Notes of a Native Son he has frequently written with a combination of passion, insight and intelligence to which his prose is equal. What sets Baldwin apart from even the best of his contemporaries is that he is an unproclaim...

Going to Meet the Man, Baldwin's first collection of short stories, is closer in spirit, tone, and achievement to his best critical work than it is to his "sensational" fiction. These are stories beautifully made to frame genuine experience in a lyrical language. They are, for the most part, free from the intellectual sin of confusing the Negro's (and/or the white man's) tragedy with the homosexual's psychic deformity. They sing with truth dug out from pain…....

The novelistic walls of "Just Above My Head" bulge and leak. But the form Baldwin chooses to write in no longer matters. His great and peculiar power is to re-create the maddening halfway house that the black man finds himself in in late-twentieth-century America. Baldwin is a prophet, a master of exhortation. Only weariness makes his voice crack. (p. 219) Whitney Balliet, "Father and Son," in The New Yorker (© 1979 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LV, ...