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James Baldwin was born in Harlem to an unmarried domestic worker, and
rose from poverty and illegitimacy to become one of the most powerfully
eloquent voices of the Civil Rights Movement. At the age of fourteen he
became a preacher in his stepfather’s Fireside Pentecostal Church, and
though he left the ministry when he was eighteen, the style and cadences
of the Pentecostal pulpit remained a feature of his writing for the rest
of his life.
Through the intervention of the writer Richard Wright, Baldwin secured
a grant which allowed him to support himself as a writer in Paris. From
1948 until his death he spent much of his time abroad, and the distance
provided him with the perspective he needed to write passionately about
the experience of being Black in America. His first novel, Go Tell
It on the Mountain (1953), drew on his experiences as a teenage
preacher. “Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when
he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John,
without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself.”
In 1956 Baldwin published Giovanni’s Room, one of the first
American novels to deal with the topic of homosexuality. The narrator
of the story is David, a white bisexual American ex-patriot living in
Paris. Giovanni, David’s Italian lover, is condemned to be executed as
a murderer. David is torn between his fiancée Hella and his lover, and
his confusion mirrors that of many gay men during the 1950s. “But
people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and
friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these
and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to
life.” Giovanni’s Room was an act of daring, and drew criticism
for its frankness — even from critics who only three years earlier had
lavishly praised Baldwin as the new voice of Black America.
With the explosion of the Civil Rights Movement, Baldwin began to spend
more time in the United States and he became one of the movement’s most
eloquent advocates. His published political essays, especially Notes
of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), are
considered some of the finest in American letters.
In 1974 and again in 1979, under the auspices of the Regents
Lectureship Program, James Baldwin delivered a series of lectures in
Wheeler Auditorium on the Berkeley campus, and met with students,
faculty and staff in a reception held in the Morrison Room of the Doe
Library. The lectures were recorded, and are available on-line through
the Media Resources Center.
Read (And Listen To) More About It
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James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York : Knopf,
1953)
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----------, Giovanni’s Room (New York : Dial Press, 1956)
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----------, Notes of a Native Son (Boston : Beacon Press, 1955)
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----------, The Fire Next Time (New York : Dial Press, 1963)
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On-line recordings of James Baldwin’s lectures at Berkeley:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/audiofiles.html#jbald1
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/audiofiles.html#jbald2
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Correspondence and papers relating to the visit of James Baldwin to
the University of California, Berkeley, as Regents lecturer in April and
May, 1979, CU-79, The University Archives, University of California,
Berkeley
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