114 Facts About James Baldwin

James Baldwin garnered acclaim for his work across several forms, including essays, novels, plays, and poems.

James Baldwin's protagonists are often but not exclusively African American, and gay and bisexual men frequently feature prominently in his literature.

James Baldwin's reputation has endured since his death and his work has been adapted for the screen to great acclaim.

David James Baldwin was born in Bunkie, Louisiana, and preached in New Orleans, but left the South for Harlem in 1919.

How David and Emma met is uncertain, but in James Baldwin's semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, the characters based on the two are introduced by the man's sister, who is a friend of the woman.

James Baldwin moved several times in his early life but always to different addresses in Harlem.

David Baldwin was many years Emma's senior; he may have been born before Emancipation in 1863, although James did not know exactly how old his stepfather was.

David's father and James Baldwin's paternal grandfather had been born enslaved.

James Baldwin referred to his stepfather simply as his "father" throughout his life, but David Sr.

David James Baldwin sometimes took out his anger on his family, and the children became fearful of him, tensions to some degree balanced by the love lavished on them by their mother.

David James Baldwin grew paranoid near the end of his life.

James Baldwin was committed to a mental asylum in 1943 and died of tuberculosis on July 29 of that year, the same day Emma gave birth to their last child, Paula.

James Baldwin was molded not only by the difficult relationships in his own household but by the results of poverty and discrimination he saw all around him.

At five years old, James Baldwin began school at Public School 24 on 128th Street in Harlem.

Ayer stated that James Baldwin got his writing talent from his mother, whose notes to school were greatly admired by the teachers, and that her son learned to write like an angel, albeit an avenging one.

James Baldwin won a prize for a short story that was published in a church newspaper.

James Baldwin's teachers recommended that he go to a public library on 135th Street in Harlem, a place that would become a sanctuary for James Baldwin and where he would make a deathbed request for his papers and effects to be deposited.

James Baldwin later remarked that he "adored" Cullen's poetry, and said he found the spark of his dream to live in France in Cullen's early impression on him.

In 1938, James Baldwin applied to and was accepted at De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, a predominantly white, predominantly Jewish school, matriculating there that fall.

At De Witt Clinton, James Baldwin worked on the school's magazine, the Magpie with Richard Avedon, who went on to become a noted photographer, and Emile Capouya and Sol Stein, who would both become renowned publishers.

James Baldwin did interviews and editing at the magazine and published a number of poems and other writings.

James Baldwin first joined the now-demolished Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church on Lenox Avenue in 1937, but followed the preacher there, Bishop Rose Artemis Horn, who was affectionately called Mother Horn, when she left to preach at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly.

James Baldwin delivered his final sermon at Fireside Pentecostal in 1941.

James Baldwin left school in 1941 to earn money to help support his family.

James Baldwin secured a job helping to build a United States Army depot in New Jersey.

In Belle Mead, James Baldwin came to know the face of a prejudice that deeply frustrated and angered him and that he named the partial cause of his later emigration out of America.

James Baldwin took a succession of menial jobs, and feared becoming like his stepfather, who had been unable to properly provide for his family.

James Baldwin became listless and unstable, drifting from this odd job to that.

James Baldwin drank heavily, and endured the first of his nervous breakdowns.

James Baldwin lived in several locations in Greenwich Village, first with Delaney, then with a scattering of other friends in the area.

James Baldwin took a job at the Calypso Restaurant, an unsegregated eatery famous for the parade of prominent Black people who dined there.

At Calypso, James Baldwin worked under Trinidadian restauranteur Connie Williams, whom Delaney had introduced him to.

James Baldwin had numerous one-night stands with various men, and several relationships with women.

James Baldwin's major love during these years in the Village was an ostensibly straight Black man named Eugene Worth.

James Baldwin never expressed his desire for Worth, and Worth died by suicide after jumping from the George Washington Bridge in 1946.

In 1944 James Baldwin met Marlon Brando, whom he was attracted to, at a theater class in The New School.

Later, in 1945, James Baldwin started a literary magazine called The Generation with Claire Burch, who was married to Brad Burch, James Baldwin's classmate from De Witt Clinton.

Nonetheless, James Baldwin sent letters to Wright regularly in the subsequent years and would reunite with Wright in Paris in 1948, though their relationship turned for the worse soon after the Paris reunion.

James Baldwin wrote many reviews for The New Leader, but was published for the first time in The Nation in a 1947 review of Maxim Gorki's Best Short Stories.

James Baldwin's conclusion in "Harlem Ghetto" was that Harlem was a parody of white America, with white American anti-Semitism included.

James Baldwin published his second essay in The New Leader, riding a mild wave of excitement over "Harlem Ghetto": in "Journey to Atlanta", James Baldwin uses the diary recollections of his younger brother David, who had gone to Atlanta as part of a singing group, to unleash a lashing of irony and scorn on the South, white radicals, and ideology itself.

James Baldwin tried to write another novel, Ignorant Armies, plotted in the vein of Native Son with a focus on a scandalous murder, but no final product materialized and his strivings toward a novel remained unsated.

James Baldwin spent two months out of summer 1948 at Shanks Village, a writer's colony in Woodstock, New York.

James Baldwin then published his first work of fiction, a short story called "Previous Condition", in the October 1948 issue of Commentary, about a 20-something Black man who is evicted from his apartment, the apartment a metaphor for white society.

In 1948, with $1,500 in funding from a Rosenwald Fellowship, James Baldwin attempted a photography and essay book titled Unto the Dying Lamb with a photographer friend named Theodore Pelatowski, whom James Baldwin met through Richard Avedon.

James Baldwin hoped for a more peaceable existence in Paris.

In Paris, James Baldwin was involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank.

James Baldwin started to publish his work in literary anthologies, notably Zero which was edited by his friend Themistocles Hoetis and which had already published essays by Richard Wright.

James Baldwin spent nine years living in Paris, mostly in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, with various excursions to Switzerland, Spain, and back to the United States.

James Baldwin was continuously poor during his time in Paris, with only momentary respites from that condition.

James Baldwin met Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss boy, seventeen years old at the time of their first meeting, who came to France in search of excitement.

James Baldwin wrote "The Preservation of Innocence", which traced the violence against homosexuals in American life to the protracted adolescence of America as a society.

In December 1949, James Baldwin was arrested and jailed for receiving stolen goods after an American friend brought him bedsheets that the friend had taken from another Paris hotel.

James Baldwin's critique of Wright is an extension of his disapprobation toward protest literature.

In that essay, James Baldwin described some unintentional mistreatment and offputting experiences at the hands of Swiss villagers who possessed a racial innocence few Americans could attest to.

In 1954 James Baldwin took a fellowship at the MacDowell writer's colony in New Hampshire to help the process of writing of a new novel and won a Guggenheim Fellowship.

James Baldwin spent several weeks in Washington, DC and particularly around Howard University while he collaborated with Owen Dodson for the premiere of The Amen Corner, returning to Paris in October 1955.

James Baldwin committed himself to a return to the United States in 1957, so he set about in early 1956 to enjoy what would be his last year in France.

James Baldwin became friends with Norman and Adele Mailer, was recognized by the National Institute of Arts and Letters with a grant, and was set to publish Giovanni's Room.

James Baldwin regretted the attempt almost instantly and called a friend who had him regurgitate the pills before the doctor arrived.

James Baldwin went on to attend the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in September 1956, a conference he found disappointing in its perverse reliance on European themes while nonetheless purporting to extol African originality.

James Baldwin's first published work, a review of the writer Maxim Gorky, appeared in The Nation in 1947.

James Baldwin continued to publish in that magazine at various times in his career and was serving on its editorial board at his death in 1987.

James Baldwin began writing it when he was only seventeen and first published it in Paris.

James Baldwin continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known.

James Baldwin again resisted labels with the publication of this work.

James Baldwin grew particularly close to his younger brother, David Jr.

Meanwhile, James Baldwin agreed to rewrite parts of Go Tell It on the Mountain in exchange for a $250 advance and a further $750 paid when the final manuscript was completed.

James Baldwin set sail back to Europe on August 28 and Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in May 1953.

The book contained practically all the major themes that would continue to run through James Baldwin's work: searching for self when racial myths cloud reality; accepting an inheritance ; claiming a birthright ; the artist's loneliness; love's urgency.

Nonetheless, most acutely in this stage in his career, James Baldwin wanted to escape the rigid categories of protest literature and he viewed adopting a white point-of-view as a good method of doing so.

Shortly after returning to Paris, James Baldwin got word from Dial Press that Giovanni's Room had been accepted for publication.

Meanwhile, James Baldwin was increasingly burdened by the sense that he was wasting time in Paris.

James Baldwin suggests that the portrait of Black life in Uncle Tom's Cabin "has set the tone for the attitude of American whites towards Negroes for the last one hundred years", and that, given the novel's popularity, this portrait has led to a unidimensional characterization of Black Americans that does not capture the full scope of Black humanity.

James Baldwin initially intended to complete Another Country before returning to New York in the fall of 1957 but progress on the novel was trudging along, so he ultimately decided to go back to the United States sooner.

Nonetheless, after a brief visit with Edith Piaf, James Baldwin set sail for New York in July 1957.

Around the time of publication of The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin became a known spokesperson for civil rights and a celebrity noted for championing the cause of Black Americans.

James Baldwin frequently appeared on television and delivered speeches on college campuses.

James Baldwin lived in France for most of his later life.

James Baldwin settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France in 1970, in an old Provencal house beneath the ramparts of the famous village.

James Baldwin's house was always open to his friends who frequently visited him while on trips to the French Riviera.

James Baldwin learned to speak French fluently and developed friendships with French actor Yves Montand and French writer Marguerite Yourcenar who translated James Baldwin's play The Amen Corner into French.

The years James Baldwin spent in Saint-Paul-de-Vence were years of work.

James Baldwin wrote several of his last works in his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, including Just Above My Head in 1979 and Evidence of Things Not Seen in 1985.

On December 1,1987, James Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.

James Baldwin was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

James Baldwin had been in the process of purchasing his house from his landlady, Mlle.

At the time of his death, James Baldwin did not have full ownership of the home, although it was still Mlle.

James Baldwin's home, nicknamed "Chez Baldwin", has been the center of scholarly work and artistic and political activism.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture has an online exhibit titled "Chez James Baldwin" which uses his historic French home as a lens to explore his life and legacy.

Love for James Baldwin cannot be safe; it involves the risk of commitment, the risk of removing the masks and taboos placed on us by society.

James Baldwin returned to the United States in the summer of 1957 while the civil rights legislation of that year was being debated in Congress.

James Baldwin had been powerfully moved by the image of a young girl, Dorothy Counts, braving a mob in an attempt to desegregate schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv had suggested he report on what was happening in the American South.

James Baldwin expressed the hope that socialism would take root in the United States.

James Baldwin made a prominent appearance at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28,1963, with Belafonte and long-time friends Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando.

In March 1965, James Baldwin joined marchers who walked 50 miles from Selma, Alabama, to the capitol in Montgomery under the protection of federal troops.

In 1968, James Baldwin signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to make income tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

James Baldwin became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion.

Later support came from Richard Wright, whom James Baldwin called "the greatest black writer in the world".

Wright and Baldwin became friends, and Wright helped Baldwin secure the Eugene F Saxon Memorial Award.

In 1949 James Baldwin met and fell in love with Lucien Happersberger, a boy aged 17, though Happersberger's marriage three years later left James Baldwin distraught.

James Baldwin was a close friend of the singer, pianist, and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin helped Simone learn about the Civil Rights Movement.

James Baldwin provided her with literary references influential on her later work.

James Baldwin influenced the work of French painter Philippe Derome, whom he met in Paris in the early 1960s.

James Baldwin wrote at length about his "political relationship" with Malcolm X James Baldwin collaborated with childhood friend Richard Avedon on the 1964 book Nothing Personal.

James Baldwin was made a Commandeur de la Legion d'Honneur by the French government in 1986.

James Baldwin's name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song "Hot Topic", released in 1999.

In 2005, the United States Postal Service created a first-class postage stamp dedicated to James Baldwin, which featured him on the front with a short biography on the back of the peeling paper.

In 2012, James Baldwin was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people.

Readings of James Baldwin's writing were held at The National Black Theatre and a month-long art exhibition featuring works by New York Live Arts and artist Maureen Kelleher.

In June 2019, James Baldwin was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City's Stonewall Inn.

James Baldwin published six short stories in various magazines between 1948 and 1960:.

Many essays by James Baldwin were published for the first time as part of collections, which included older, individually-published works of James Baldwin's as well.