Additional Resources for Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin

Sonny's Blues Further Reading

Albert, Richard N. "The Jazz-Blues Motif in Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues'," in College Literature, Spring, 1984, pp. 178-85.

This article discusses the use that Baldwin makes of music in "Sonny's Blues," and explains the role that jazz and blues play in the African-American tradition.

Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America Yale University Press, 1958.

A classic, if somewhat dated, historical evaluation of the place of the novel in the African-American literary tradition and the place of African-American novels in American literary history. A "Postscript" concentrates specifically on James Baldwin,

Hakutam, Yoshinobu, and Robert Butler. The City in African-American Literature, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995.

Containing two essays specifically about James Baldwin, this collection traces the use of the image of the city in African-American literature from Frederick Douglass to the present day. One of the Baldwin essays, by Fred L. Standley, holds that Baldwin...
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