James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories

James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories
Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: Library of America
Language: English
Pages: 970
Size: 13.1 x 20.8
Weight: 660 g
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9781883011512
Availability: In stock
Price: €39.95
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Product Description

“The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review, “found eloquent expression in [Baldwin’s] novels. His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence.

His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin’s own experience, of a preacher’s son coming of age in 1930’s Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as “an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us.”

Giovanni’s Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America’s racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin’s most ambitious novel.

Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin’s short fiction, including the masterful “Sonny’s Blues,” the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

Toni Morrison, volume editor, was the author of numerous award–winning novels, including Love, Jazz, Song of Solomon, Sula, The Bluest Eye, and Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. From 1989 to 2006 she was Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012.