James Baldwin

Essays, Novels and Plays

Note: Only a few books have summaries as the information provided below can be found on the James Baldwin page on amazon.com.

The Amen Corner (play)

Another Country

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.

The Cross Of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (essays)

The Devil Finds Work (essays)

The Evidence Of Things Not Seen (essays)

The Fire Next Time (essays)

At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.

I Am Not Your Negro (posthumous documentary film and book)

If Beale Street Could Talk

Giovanni’s Room (autobiographical)

Go Tell It On The Mountain

Jimmy’s Blues (poetry)

Just Above My Head

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes Of A Native Son (essays)

No Name In The Street

This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail, he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain—the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

Notes Of A Native Son (essays)

The Price Of The Ticket (essays)

Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone

1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain (semi-autobiographical novel)

1954 The Amen Corner (play)

1955 Notes of a Native Son (essays)

1956 Giovanni's Room

1961 Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (essays)

1962 Another Country

1963 A Talk to Teachers (essay)

1963 The Fire Next Time (essays)

1964 Blues for Mister Charlie (play)

1965 Going to Meet the Man (stories)

1968 Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

1972 No Name in the Street (essays)

1974 If Beale Street Could Talk

1976 The Devil Finds Work (essays)

1979 Just Above My Head

Collaborations

1964 Nothing Personal (with Richard Avedon, photography)

1971 A Rap on Race (with Margaret Mead)

In 1970, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, an American cultural anthropologist, met for an extraordinary seven-and-a-half-hour discussion about race and society. Mead brought her knowledge of racism as practiced in remote societies around the world. Baldwin brought his personal experience with the legacy of black American history. They talked with candor, passion, rage, and brilliance, and their discussion became this unique volume. Here is Baldwin's creativity and fire. Here is Mead's scholarship and reason. And here, for all to see, are their prejudices, their pain, and finally, their shared desire to find the thread that binds us all.

1971 A Passenger From The West (in English), narrative with Baldwin, conversations, by Nabile Farès; long-lost interview appended

1972 One Day When I Was Lost (orig.: A. Haley)

1973 A Dialogue (with Nikki Giovanni)

1976 Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (with Yoran Cazac)

2004 Native Sons (with Sol Stein, published posthumously)