James Baldwin,Toni Morrison
James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peckâ€™s documentary â€œI Am Not Your Negro.â€ Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of Americaâ€™s Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwinâ€™s nonfiction ever published.,With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, Baldwin fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as â€œThe Harlem Ghetto,â€ â€œEverybodyâ€™s Protest Novel,â€ â€œMany Thousands Gone,â€ and â€œStranger in the Village.â€,Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, ,Notes of a Native Son, (1955) and ,Nobody Knows My Name, (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political. â€œOne writes,â€ he stated, â€œout of one thing onlyâ€”oneâ€™s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.â€ With singular eloquence and unblinking sharpness of observation he lived up to his credo: â€œI want to be an honest man and a good writer.â€,The classic ,The Fire Next Time, (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of Americaâ€™s racial divide and an impassioned call to â€œend the racial nightmareâ€¦and change the history of the world.â€ The later volumes ,No Name in the Street, (1972) and ,The Devil Finds Work, (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era and include his remarkable works of film criticism. A further 36 essaysâ€”nine of them previously uncollectedâ€”include some of Baldwinâ€™s earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.
Writing,Essays,Nonfiction,Race,History,Classics,Cultural,African American,Politics,Literature,Autobiography,Memoir,American,African American Literature
Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays