James Baldwin (1924–1987) is one of the great twentieth-century American writers. His career was long and prolific, spanning forty years and resulting in twenty-three books published in his lifetime, along with numerous articles and interviews, many of which have not yet been collected. His books include six novels, seven collections of essays, two plays, two collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, a phototext (a collaboration with Richard Avedon), two dialogues (one with Margaret Mead, the other with Nikki Giovanni), a screenplay, and a children’s story. In 1989 Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt edited a collection...

When James Baldwin died in 1987, five thousand people attended his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Harlem. The people came to celebrate his life and to mourn his passing because he had changed their lives; he was “quite possibly for his times their most essential interpreter.”¹ Literary agent Marie Brown described Baldwin’s passing as “the end of an era.” He was “the last survivor ... of those few most powerful moral articulators who could effectively lecture the society, among the very few whom we could quote almost daily as scripture of social consciousness.”² A substantial...

At the end ofTell Me How Long the Train’s Been GoneJames Baldwin signs his work by listing the places and dates where it was written: “New York, Istanbul, San Francisco, 1965–1967.” This journalistic signature draws attention to the autobiographical element of the novel and invites readers to understand it in its historical and political context as the most recent chapter of Baldwin’s ongoing chronicle of his experience in a racially divided American landscape. The list of cities suggests the author’s status as an international celebrity, but it also suggests his displacement and the difficulty he had finding...

If Beale Street Could Talk(1974) was published six years afterTell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,the year James Baldwin turned fifty. While some of the novel’s thematic concerns are familiar to Baldwin readers, it represents, in several respects, a major departure from his previous novels. In contrast to the leisurely, detailed retrospective ofTell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Beale Streetis a slim volume, fewer than 200 pages. The story takes place, for the most part, in the present and moves along with a speed and lyricism not characteristic of Baldwin’s other novels....

Just Above My Head (JAMH),published in 1979, five years afterIf Beale Street Could Talk,is Baldwin’s last novel. It is also his longest and most ambitious work, 597 pages in the Dial Press edition.JAMHspans a time period of about thirty years, from the mid-forties to the mid-to-Iate seventies, and follows the lives of four main characters and three generations of the Montana family. The central foci are the life of Arthur Montana, who begins his career as a gospel singer, then gains worldwide fame as the Soul Emperor, and the life of his brother, Hall, who...

It is my hope that this study results in an appreciation of James Baldwin’s undervalued later work. His last three novels, in particular, reveal that Baldwin continued to be a profound witness to the American experience. He gave testimony to the racial struggles of the 1960s and 1970s by exploring the relationship between private life and political realities in ways no one has done since. As a witness he described not only the social landscape, but also the human heart, giving testimony to our desires and dreams for a new identity and a new nation.

A serious evaluation of Baldwin’s...