James Baldwin: A BiographyHe was one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary men of letters. Angry, provocative, courageous, James Baldwin wrote with such fierce eloquence about issues of race and sex that his great books - Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time - are now part of the canon of American literature. The literary scholar David Leeming, a friend of Baldwin's for twenty-five years, brings us closer than we have ever been to the complex, troubled, brilliant man who struggled out of Harlem to create a series of works that expose the essential racism of America, and indeed the world. Leeming explores every aspect of Baldwin's life - his relationships with the famous and the unknown, his homosexuality and precarious style of life, his expatriate years in France and Turkey, his gift for compassion and love, the public pressures that overwhelmed his quest for fulfillment and happiness, and above all his inspired and passionate battle against the white society's blindness to black identity. "I've been here three hundred and fifty years", he would tell a white audience, "but you've never seen me". James Baldwin died in 1987 in France at the age of sixty-three. He lives vividly in the pages of David Leeming's powerful biography. |
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