The Economist (US), June 18th, 1994
JAMES BALDWIN: A BIOGRAPHY. By David Leeming. Alfred Knopf; 388 pages; $25. Pelham; Pounds 20
POP-EYED, skinny, pigeon-toed Jimmy Baldwin was nobody's idea of a popular political hero. He was black, homosexual, illegitimate, lonely, funny, a self-exiled aesthete whose literary master was Henry James. Yet when history called he found the words to serve his people's cause.
Baldwin was the complete outsider. His mother's husband had him trained as a boy preacher in Harlem, a trade for which his sense of the ridiculous unfitted him. From it he gleaned a string of high- camp anecdotes, a disbel...
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