James Baldwin: A Biography

by David Leeming

Overview

“The most revealing and subjectively penetrating assessment of Baldwin’s life yet published.” —The New York Times Book Review. “The first Baldwin biography in which one can recognize the human features of this brilliant, troubled, principled, supremely courageous man.” —Boston Globe

James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canon—Go Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen—he explored issues of race and racism in America, class distinction, and sexual difference.

A gay, African American writer who was born in Harlem, he found the freedom to express himself living in exile in Paris. When he returned to America to cover the Civil Rights movement, he became an activist and controversial spokesman for the movement, writing books that became bestsellers and made him a celebrity, landing him on the cover of Time.

In this biography, David Leeming creates an intimate portrait of a complex, troubled, driven, and brilliant man. He plumbs every aspect of Baldwin’s life: his relationships with the unknown and the famous, including painter Beauford Delaney, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and childhood friend Richard Avedon; his expatriate years in France and Turkey; his gift for compassion and love; the public pressures that overwhelmed his quest for happiness, and his passionate battle for black identity, racial justice, and to “end the racial nightmare and achieve our country.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628724387
Publisher:	Arcade
Publication date:	02/24/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	123,621
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

David Leeming, emeritus professor of English at the University of Connecticut, was a friend of James Baldwin for twenty-five years as well as his assistant from 1963 to 1967. He is also the author of several works on world mythology, including The World of Myth: An Anthology and Medusa: In the Mirror of Time. He lives in Rhinebeck, New York.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements xi

1 The Harlem Life 3

2 Bill Miller 14

3 Awakenings 21

4 Beauford Delaney 32

5 Probings 37

6 The Expatriate 56

7 Lucien and the Mountain 74

8 Go Tell It on the Mountain 84

9 The Search for Giovanni 90

10 Notes of a Native Son 98

11 The Amen Corner 106

12 A Period of Transition 114

13 Giovanni's Room 122

14 End of an Era 130

15 The Journey South 135

16 The Call of the Stage 140

17 Sermons and Blues 157

18 In Search of a Role 172

19 Nobody Knows My Name 183

20 Another Country 200

21 Africa and The Fire Next Time 207

22 The Activist 216

23 Blues for Mister Charlie 231

24 Lucien and the White Problem 243

25 Searching for a New Life 252

26 Istanbul 262

27 Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone 278

28 One Day, When I Was Lost 284

29 No Name in the Street 303

30 If Beale Street Could Talk 323

31 The Devil Finds Work 330

32 Just Above My Head 345

33 The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Remember This House 352

34 Gathering Around the Welcome Table 372

Notes 389

Chronological Bibliography of Printed Works James Baldwin 405

Index 419

Editorial Reviews

“The best literary biography I’ve read in a long time. An engrossing narrative.” —Leon Edel

“The most revealing and subjectively penetrating assessment of Baldwin’s life yet published.” —The New York Times Book Review

“The first Baldwin biography in which one can recognize the human features of this brilliant, troubled, principled, supremely courageous man.” —Boston Globe

“Loving but honest . . . [Baldwin] wrote, ‘No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it,’ and . . . Mr. Leeming shows so well [the price he paid].” —The New York Times

“Intimate, artful—and major . . . An exceptional literary biography deserving wide promotion and readership . . . [by] a personal friend of the great novelist and essayist.” —Booklist

“Highly perceptive, revealing.” —Publishers Weekly

“The best literary biography I’ve read in a long time. An engrossing narrative.” —Leon Edel

“The most revealing and subjectively penetrating assessment of Baldwin’s life yet published.” —The New York Times Book Review

“The first Baldwin biography in which one can recognize the human features of this brilliant, troubled, principled, supremely courageous man.” —Boston Globe

“Loving but honest . . . [Baldwin] wrote, ‘No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it,’ and . . . Mr. Leeming shows so well [the price he paid].” —The New York Times

“Intimate, artful—and major . . . An exceptional literary biography deserving wide promotion and readership . . . [by] a personal friend of the great novelist and essayist.” —Booklist

“Highly perceptive, revealing.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

James Baldwin (1924-1987), whose novels and essays aimed to liberate white America from the hypocrisy that made oppression and racism possible, was obsessed with his mission to bear witness to injustice, observes Leeming, who was Baldwin's secretary and longtime friend. Beneath the fiercely eloquent, prophetic writer was a troubled, vulnerable, lonely individual longing to be cradled and protected. Both sides of the man are probed in this highly perceptive, revealing biography, which Baldwin authorized in 1979. Leeming, who is now a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, draws on interviews with Baldwin to illuminate the writer's difficulty in accepting his homosexuality, his attempted suicide in Paris in 1956, the strong autobiographical component in his fiction, his uneasy association with the Black Panthers and his formative relationship with his unloving stepfather, a puritanical, bitterly frustrated preacher who went mad. Photos. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Conscience-afflicting prose that probed what it meant to be an American, a Negro, and a male put Baldwin (1924-87) in the first rank of 20th-century American writers. His one-time personal secretary Leeming argues in this biography, which Baldwin reportedly authorized before his death, that the writer was a prophet and witness tormented by demons of illegitimacy and racial and sexual alienation. Obsessed with the question of identity and struggling to work out a vision of his life, Baldwin ( Go Tell It on the Mountain; Giovanni's Room ) necessarily welded his writing from autobiography. The personal Baldwin that Leeming contributes will be indispensable to Baldwin scholars and a complement to other recent works of evaluation such as James Campbell's Talking at the Gates ( LJ 4/1/91), William J. Weatherby's James Baldwin: Artist on Fire ( LJ 5/1/89), and Horace A. Porter's Stealing the Fire ( LJ 2/1/89). Recommended for collections on Baldwin, blacks, and 20th-century U.S. society and literature.-- Thomas J. Davis, SUNY at Buffalo

Library Journal