James Baldwin was born on August 2,1924, in New York City, to David Baldwin, a factory worker and clergyman, and Emma (Jones) Baldwin. Baldwin was the eldest of nine children, whom he spent much of his childhood helping to raise and care for amidst the poverty of black Harlem. During his high school years, the young Baldwin became a revivalist minister for the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. He graduated from De Witt Clinton High School in 1942, after which he began working in the defense industry in New Jersey. In 1942, when his stepfather died, Baldwin decided to become a writer and moved to Greenwich Village, New York, to pursue his goal. There he took on various unskilled odd jobs while working on his first novel. In 1944, he met the celebrated black novelist Richard Wright, who aided Baldwin's career by helping him to get an Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship. Finding...