"And I suggest this: that in order to learn your name, you are going to have to learn mine. In the early 1960s, Baldwin returned to the United States, feeling a deep sense of responsibility, both as an American and specifically as a black American, to aid the civil rights movement. If I hadn't gone away, I would never have been able to see it and if I was unable to see it, I would never have been able to forgive it" ( Last Interview, 21). When he came back, "I began to see this country for the first time. His years in Europe, he says, were crucial in giving him perspective. There he was able to escape the racial and personal pressures by which he felt constrained in the United States. The time he spent in France and other European countries has been described as "crucial to his development as a writer" ("Sonny's Blues," 246). Later during this period, Baldwin also wrote Giovanni's Room (1956), in which he turned to his own struggles with homosexuality for inspiration.
He credits Smith, a popular African American blues singer of the 20s and 30s, with helping to awaken him to his own identity. To write the book, he lived alone in the mountains of Switzerland, "armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter" ( The Last Interview, 4). It was in Europe that Baldwin wrote and published his first and perhaps most critically acclaimed piece of fiction: Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel about religion and the African American experience. With Wright's help, Baldwin won a literary grant, which he used to move to Paris and support his writing. Many critics have noted that the cadences and tones of the Bible influenced Baldwin's later writings.īy 1944 Baldwin had moved to Greenwich Village, where he met and developed a friendship with Richard Wright, a preeminent African American writer. As a teenager, Baldwin emulated his stepfather, a strict preacher, by preaching to a small congregation and becoming increasingly involved with religion. One of nine children, Baldwin discovered his passion for reading and writing at a young age and could often be found in the library. The grandson of a slave, James Baldwin was born, like the protagonists of his short story " Sonny's Blues," into poverty in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Baldwin's fiery essays and fiction addressed issues of race, poverty, power, and justice. James Baldwin was a well-known public figure and American writer, whose works played a significant role in the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
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