1924 - 1987

 

James Baldwin is considered one of the finest writers of USA, known best for his eloquent essays on American race relations. His semiautobiographical first novel Go Tell it on the Mountain examines the spiritual struggles and painful family history of a minister's son in Harlem. Baldwin became a preacher at fourteen. After the death of his strict stepfather, he felt more free to pursue a writing career. In 1948 he moved to Paris, where he believed he could view his past and his nation more clearly, and he remained abroad for most of his life.

As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the two decades following World War II, James Baldwin landed squarely in the public eye, and his prose communicated the hope and frustration of the fight for racial equality.

James Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin was born in New York in 1924. Between the late 1940s and the 1980s he produced 22 books, essays of all kinds, a children's book, a screenplay, and a chapbook. His successes are most impressive in light of how easily they might not have happened. Early in his life, dispossession marked him for its own. James Baldwin never knew his father's last name; he was bruisingly ill-treated by his stepfather; and sexual ambivalence haunted most of his life.

 

Giovanni`s Room

Novel by James Baldwin, published in 1956. After a single homosexual experience in adolescence, David represses his unacceptable impulses. In Paris, he meets Hella Lincoln. He is determined to live the life that he thinks is expected of a male in white, middle-class Western culture. He and Hella have an affair, and David proposes marriage.

While Hella is in Spain considering his proposal, David has an affair lasting several months with Giovanni, an Italian bartender. Still unable to reconcile homosexuality with the life he envisions for himself, David rejects Giovanni. David and Hella go to the south of France.

She finds him in a homosexual bar with a sailor and realizes what David's relationship with Giovanni had been. David is left alone, abandoned by Hella, and still in conflict over his sexuality.

Giovanni's Room, p. 157

"Jacques was aware, I was aware, as we pushed our way to the bar - it was like moving into the field of a magnet or like approaching a small circle of heat - of the presence of a new barman. He stood, insolent and dark and leonine, his elbow leaning on the cash register, his fingers playing with his chin, looking out a the crowd. It was as though his station was a promontory and we were the sea ...

He stood up, standing in the center of the room under the light, looking at me. I stood up, too, half smiling, but also, in some strange, dim way, a little frightened.'Viens m'embrasser,' he said.

I was vividly aware that he held a brick in his hand, I held a brick in mine. It really seemed for an instant that if I did not go to him, we would use these bricks to beat each other to death.Yet, I could not move at once. We stared at each other across a narrow space that was full of danger, that almost seemed to roar, like flame.

'Come,' he said.

I dropped my brick and went to him. In a moment I heard his fall. And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder. "

 

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