James Arthur Baldwin, fiction writer, essayist, dramatist, and poet, was born on August 2, 1924 in Harlem, New York during the Harlem Renaissance. After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in 1942, he began his formal career as a writer.

Baldwin’s work addressed major aspects of the black experience. His themes, ranging from black church culture to the antipathy between the police and black urban male dwellers, were celebrated and critiqued in Baldwin’s collected work. Baldwin also made music—jazz, blues, and gospel—a central force in the world of his characters.

James Arthur Baldwin died in France, his adopted home, in 1987, and where he had once noted that for the first time he had been called simply “an American.” Baldwin had lived in France from 1948 to 1962 when he returned to the United States to participate in the Civil Rights Movement. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Baldwin returned permanently to Europe to escape the racism and homophobia that threatened to suffocate his life in the United States. (From BlackPast.org)

Find more biographical details about James Baldwin through PBS and American National Biography.