The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name in the Street; The Devil Finds Work: Introduction by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) - Hardcover

Baldwin, James

 
9781101908471: The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name in the Street; The Devil Finds Work: Introduction by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101908475 ISBN 13: 9781101908471
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A major hardcover compendium of nonfiction by one of America's most brilliant essayists, timed to the celebration of his centenary

Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual James Baldwin is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This Everyman's Library collection includes his bestselling, galvanizing essay The Fire Next Time—which gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s and still lights the way to understanding race in America today—along with three additional brilliant works of nonfiction by this seminal chronicler and analyst of culture. From No Name In the Street's extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies to the "passionate, probing, controversial" (The Atlantic) Nobody Knows My Name and the incisive criticism of American movies in The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin's stunning prose over and over proves relevant to our contemporary struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were best sellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.

EDDIE S. GLAUDE, JR. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy in Black and Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. He is a contributor to the MSNBC cable news channel and frequently appears as a commentator on the Morning Joe and Deadline: White House programs.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

from the introduction by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

In 1986, about a year before his death, James Baldwin sat down with David C. Estes for the New Orleans Review to talk about his latest book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. It was a wide-ranging interview, a kind of retrospective of Baldwin’s career as a writer and a refl ection, in light of the new book, on his career as an essayist. It is in the context of this discussion that the question of how he became an essayist emerged.

How did he think about the form? How did he see himself as someone who inhabited the genre at the highest level? After all, at this point in his career Baldwin had stood for some time as one of America’s greatest essayists. In his non-fi ction writing, particularly in the books collected here, Baldwin offered the most searing and insightful commentary on the vital questions of race, culture, and American democracy. His prose gave the nation a language in which to think about itself differently, loosed from the shackles of ideas of American exceptionalism and the illusions of whiteness that led some to believe that somehow, no matter what God said, the color of one’s skin accorded one value above or below every other human being. On the page, he forced a confrontation with the ugliness of who we are, and he did it in such a way that might have made Montaigne nod his head in recognition. Simply put, Baldwin had mastered the form.

In this interview with Estes, however, Baldwin admitted that he “never intended to become an essayist.” It was working with Saul Levitas at The New Leader and with Robert Warshow at Commentary when he was in his early twenties that helped him find his feet in the genre. His first inspiration came from the flaccid race books he had to review every week at The New Leader, which made clear to him that he could not write from the vantage point of a victim. Baldwin developed his approach to the question of race and American democracy in contrast to the all-too-common stale sociology and tangled web of social statistics that purported to reveal the problems of American race relations. As a young man writing reviews for The New Leader, he had his fill of such books. Sentimental accounts that treated Black people as victims. Books that refused to attend to the complexity of peoples’ lives only, in the end, to tell us to “be kind to niggers” and “be kind to Jews.” Instead, Baldwin took his readers beneath the surface of the country’s malaise to tap the root. There he asked the moral question of who we take ourselves to be as individuals and as Americans. In doing so, he forced a painful encounter with experience (with life), historical and present. That honest encounter, he insisted, could free us to deal with who we might possibly become by releasing us from the straitjacket of our national illusions. A confrontation with what torments the nation and with the pain and wounds that move us about meant keeping track of the material conditions of American life and the inner lives of those who had to bear it all. For Baldwin, and these essays make the point explicit, the unwillingness of Americans to reckon with the suffering at the heart of the country’s identity—to evade the history that makes them who they are—has made them monstrous.

Americans often long for the illusions of safety that trap us in categories while we retreat into sentimentality that gums up our ability to feel. “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion,” Baldwin wrote in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), “is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” Baldwin published those words when he was twentyfour years old. He would echo the sentiment some twenty-plus years later in No Name in the Street with a description of the “wet eyes” of a powerful white man in the South, “staring up at [his] face, and his wet hands groping for [Baldwin’s] cock, we were both, abruptly, in history’s ass-pocket.” Race, desire, and emptiness felt in an unwanted touch.

But, again, reading Baldwin requires more than tracking the pain and suffering of the nation and of himself. He does not speak as a victim. Baldwin is a poet in Emerson’s sense: that person who “shall draw us with love and terror” and “chaunt[s] our own times and social circumstance.” He is an artist, a writer, in conversation with a wide range of influences (inheritances and ancestors) that shape what he sees and how he inhabits the genre. To read him is a demanding practice: to track how the language and blues sensibilities of Black folk in the United States shape the writing; to sit with the ways the King James Bible and the homiletic structure of Black preaching influence the form; and to trace his references and invocations (to see, for example, the infl uence of Henry James in his sentence structure and the ongoing engagement with the themes that animated James’s novels like The Ambassadors, or how he riffs on Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance,” and Marcel Proust’s refl ections on time and memory), and to do this work across a wide-ranging corpus of close to seven thousand pages.

This collection begins in 1961 with Nobody Knows My Name and ends with The Devil Finds Work, published in 1976. From the height of the civil rights movement with student sit-ins, the March on Washington, and the peak of his fame with his face on the cover of Time Magazine to the stain of Watergate, the election of Jimmy Carter, and the burden of being a celebrity artist now in his fi fties with a political movement in ruins, these essays offer the reader a sense of the complex arc of Baldwin’s witness and craft.

With the publication of The Evidence of Things Not Seen in 1985, the “old man” had occasion to look back and to look forward. As he resisted Estes’s question about the New Journalism and the distinct form of Evidence, he recalled a lesson learned from Saul Bellow. “I’m speaking only for myself . . . I don’t think a writer ever should show off, anyway. Saul Bellow would say to me years and years ago, ‘Get that fancy footwork out of there.’” A lesson for writers, still. In this short interview, Baldwin revealed what sits at the heart of his essay writing, how that journey began, and how just a year before his death it ended. This Everyman’s Library edition, implicitly framed by Baldwin’s fi rst and last books, takes up what happened in between, a writer who finds his voice on the page and, by extension, in the world.


In the late 1940s, Baldwin learned from the editorial pen of Warshow that, if he was not going to lie on the page, he had to confront his own fears and terrors. He had to deal with the overbearing presence and image of his stepfather. He had to grapple with desire; not only his sexual desire but his desire to be loved. He had to face the rage deposited in his gut by a world that announced from his birth that he was inferior simply because of the color of his skin, and he had to admit, if he was to assert his right to live fully, that at one point in his life he tragically believed what the world said about him. Baldwin had to plumb the depths of his own perspective, which required he find out exactly what his perspective was. “I couldn’t talk about ‘them’ and ‘us,’” he said to Estes. “So I had to use ‘we’ and let the reader fi gure out who...

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101908475
ISBN 13 
9781101908471
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
520
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Everyman's Library
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