Today marks what would have been James Baldwin's 100th birthday. We've read two of his novels (Giovanni's Room and Just Above My Head), but there are plenty of other works in his oeuvre--fiction and non-fiction--worthy of our attention. Something to keep in mind as we prepare to collectively shape our 2025 reading list (stay tuned for more on that process).
To celebrate the American master's life and work, here are a few items of interest. (No doubt there are many more online, but these will get you started.) A helpful overview by Robert Jones Jr. appeared in the New York Times back in February: "The Best of James Baldwin." As Jones says, Baldwin's "writing is as imperative as ever. He wrote with the kind of moral vision that was as comforting as it was chastising--almost surely the influence of the pulpit he once occupied as a child preacher in his native Harlem."
Reinforcing that point, the New Yorker's online edition has republished a seminal November 1962 Baldwin essay, "Letter from a Region in My Mind," that ends with a famous warning: "If we--and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others--do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare anything, the fulfillment of that prophesy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"
Colm Tóibín published "The Last Witness," a tribute to Baldwin's legacy, in the London Review of Books back in September 2001. He aptly hails Baldwin as "the Henry James of Harlem."
Writing in the September 2019 issue of the New York Times' T Magazine, Hilton Als takes us to "Giovanni's Room Revisited." Caveat lector: The combination of lavish fashion photography with literary criticism (notwithstanding the beauty of the two male models and the excellence of the writing) didn't really work for me, but your mileage may vary.
Speaking of photography: Today's NYT features "From Harlem to Selma to Paris: James Baldwin's Life in Pictures."
Finally, the National Portrait Gallery recently opened an exhibition, "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance," that will be up through April 2025. The catalog will be published in September, but is available for pre-order (which I've just done). I haven't gotten to the show yet, but definitely plan to soon. (On a related note, I heartily recommend another show at the NPG, "Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939, which features a bevy of lesbian writers and artists, including Gertrude Stein.)
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