Here are 100 books that The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin fans have personally recommended if you like
The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin.
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Born and raised in Poland during the Cold War, I learned that writers and intellectuals could be jailed, exiled, or even killed for their ideas. I came to James Baldwin over two decades ago in search of literature that told of freedom and humanism beyond national borders and simplistic binaries. As a Black queer man driven away from his homeland, Baldwin linked his personal pain, heartbreak, and torment to his public life, authorship, and activism. His art and life story have both inspired my labors as a bilingual and bicultural literary critic and biographer and provided a template for my own journey as an immigrant, mother of a Black child, teacher, writer, and scholar.
This is still the most comprehensive and detailed account of the writer’s life and works. Leeming worked closely with Baldwin as an assistant and secretary after first meeting him in Istanbul.
I love this book, for it was my introduction to Baldwin and his life as an exile and one of the most powerful social and cultural critics of twentieth-century America. It’s written accessibly—the life-story narrative flows easily and one feels the author’s compassion for and understanding of the writer’s evolution, process, as well as his specific works.
It has taught me that the best biographies both reveal and conceal their authors’ personal investment in their subject and their own life stories. And that the best biographers must skillfully and passionately play with both.
Years ago when I first read it, it was helpful in overcoming my initial terror as an immigrant from the Other Europe, the terror that I…
"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.
I have been writing about James Baldwin for over twenty years and have been reading him since my teens. My father saw the writer debate the conservative polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. at the University of Cambridge in 1965, and I’ve been hooked since he told me about that event. I’ve written three books on Baldwin, scores of articles, and book chapters, and I co-founded the journal James Baldwin Review a decade ago. It's been wonderful to see Baldwin gain popularity over the last decade, and I hope that more people continue to read his essays, novels, plays, and poetry.
James Baldwin recalled that he wrote this book in between the assassinations of his friends Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. I have read numerous letters written by Baldwin, and this long essay, written during the 1960s, shares some of the intimacy found in his correspondence as he reflects on his role in the Civil Rights Movement.
It’s one of my favorite essays by Baldwin because it reveals his complexity and inconsistencies, giving glimpses into how he was torn between his role as a writer, artist, and activist. “[W]hat in the world was I by now,” Baldwin wonders,” but an aging, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakably erratic freak?” The writing is uneven in places, but the power and insight of Baldwin’s inimitable prose hold the essay together.
An extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies that displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works, and powerfully speaks to contemporary conversations around racism.
"It contains truth that cannot be denied.” — The Atlantic Monthly
In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness and the later events that scored his heart with pain—the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his retum to the American South to confront a violent America…
Born and raised in Poland during the Cold War, I learned that writers and intellectuals could be jailed, exiled, or even killed for their ideas. I came to James Baldwin over two decades ago in search of literature that told of freedom and humanism beyond national borders and simplistic binaries. As a Black queer man driven away from his homeland, Baldwin linked his personal pain, heartbreak, and torment to his public life, authorship, and activism. His art and life story have both inspired my labors as a bilingual and bicultural literary critic and biographer and provided a template for my own journey as an immigrant, mother of a Black child, teacher, writer, and scholar.
I discovered this compilation of many well- and lesser-known interviews when I began working on Baldwin in the year 2000. I love it as it gives us the writer in his own words, tracing his artistic development and views on his craft, exile, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as US politics, culture, and national identity. We follow Baldwin’s journey from 1961, with the famous Studs Terkel interview introducing “the young Negro writer,” to the “Last Interview” with Quincy Troupe, conducted in 1987, just days before Baldwin’s death in his beloved house in southern France. In between, we get a kaleidoscope of moments from his life and career and fascinating insights into his literary imaginary and humanistic philosophy.
This collection of interviews with James Baldwin covers the period 1961-1987, from the year of the publication of Nobody Knows My Names, his fourth book, to just a few weeks before his death. It includes the last formal conversation with him.
Twenty-seven interviews reprinted here come from a variety of sources--newspapers, radio, journals, and review--and show this celebrated author in all his eloquence, anger, and perception of racial, social, and literary situations in America.
Over the years Baldwin proved to be an easily accessible and cooperative subject for interviews, both in the United States and abroad. He frequently referred to…
I have been writing about James Baldwin for over twenty years and have been reading him since my teens. My father saw the writer debate the conservative polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. at the University of Cambridge in 1965, and I’ve been hooked since he told me about that event. I’ve written three books on Baldwin, scores of articles, and book chapters, and I co-founded the journal James Baldwin Review a decade ago. It's been wonderful to see Baldwin gain popularity over the last decade, and I hope that more people continue to read his essays, novels, plays, and poetry.
This book, a collaboration with photographer Richard Avedon, is experimental, exhilarating, and exasperating. I’ve always been drawn to it, which includes striking portraits by Avedon (Marilyn Monroe, Civil Rights workers, Allen Ginsberg) alongside Baldwin’s gnomic and haunting essay.
Panned by the New York Times in 1964, the book has been overlooked by scholars and fans of Baldwin’s work, which encouraged me to return to this troubling book. Published shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nothing Personal offers up a portrait of the United States as complex and dangerous. Baldwin’s rage at the state of America is apparent, but I’m drawn to his writing about love, which he sees as key to the country’s future:
“The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another,” Baldwin writes, “the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out.”
James Baldwin’s critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and police brutality to a new generation of readers.
Available for the first time in a stand-alone edition, Nothing Personal is Baldwin’s deep probe into the American condition. Considering the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020—which were met with tear gas and rubber bullets the same year white supremacists entered the US Capitol with little resistance, openly toting flags of the Confederacy—Baldwin’s documentation of his own troubled times cuts to the core of where we…
I have been an activist working on issues relating to human rights and youth protection for over fifteen years and during that time I worked as a lawyer and was lucky enough to make films and write two novels. Eventually, I would concentrate solely on activism and my reading would become very specific and as the focus of my activism changed and I directed my energies to corporate accountability my reading changed course again. The list I offer is from talented writers on important subjects, all write extremely well about things that matter to a human rights activist.
Baldwin writes both fiction and non-fiction beautifully and intimately and if you don’t know his non-fiction work then this is a very good place to start. Across a number of essays, he elegantly sets out the deep struggle faced by Black Americans and articulates how a different humanity, in America and beyond, and a different future can be realized.
#26 on The Guardian's list of 100 best nonfiction books of all time, the essays explore what it means to be Black in America
In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. With films like I Am Not Your Negro and the forthcoming If Beale Street Could Talk bringing renewed interest to Baldwin's life and work, Notes of a Native Son serves as a valuable introduction.
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was…
I have loved classic Hollywood movies since childhood, especially the legendary actresses of the era. My grandmother nurtured this love, taking me to the video stores to rent movies and the library to read biographies and books about actresses and Old Hollywood. Now, I am a professor of film history at Chapman University, where I teach classes on American cinema and women in film. Still, my passion for female-centered classic Hollywood movies remains strong. I have compiled a list showing the multi-faceted ways that women have participated in Hollywood cinema during its first century.
I love this book’s blend of author self-reflection and fandom of the late great Bette Davis’s star persona and career alongside her civil rights advocacy and onscreen acting with African American actors in the 1930s and 1940s. Julia Stern contextualizes Hollywood’s troubling representation of African Americans onscreen that often accompanied Davis’ own proto-feminist iconic performances in films likeJezebel, The Little Foxes, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane.
At the same time, she devotes analysis to the forgotten but riveting anti-racist film, This Our Life, directed by John Huston. With powerful performances from Black actors Hattie McDaniel and Ernest Anderson that stand apart in the Davis oeuvre, Stern effectively brings a twenty-first-century understanding of this Classic Hollywood legend. Be sure to read her footnotes—they are equally fascinating!
Bette Davis was not only one of Hollywood's brightest stars, but also one of its most outspoken advocates on matters of race. In Bette Davis Black and White, Julia A. Stern explores this largely untold facet of Davis's brilliant career.
Bette Davis Black and White analyzes four of Davis's best-known pictures-Jezebel (1938), The Little Foxes (1941), In This Our Life (1942), and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)-against the history of American race relations. Stern also weaves in memories of her own experiences as a young viewer, coming into racial consciousness watching Davis's films on television in an all-white…
Brit Bennett was born and raised in Southern California and graduated from Stanford University along with an MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller, and her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and in 2021, she was chosen as one of Time’s Next 100 Influential People. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
A fascinating exploration into the lives of three women ignored by history, the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X. By tracing the intellectual, political, and emotional strands of each woman’s life, Anna Malaika Tubbs uncovers hidden complexities within black motherhood that illuminate our understanding of the past while also shedding light on the overlooked contributions of black women today.
'A fascinating exploration into the lives of three women ignored by history ... Eye-opening, engrossing' Brit Bennett, bestselling author of The Vanishing Half
In her groundbreaking debut, Anna Malaika Tubbs tells the incredible storIES of three women who raised three world-changing men.
Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them, each fighting their own battles, born into the beginning of the twentieth century and a deadly landscape of racial prejudice,…
I love writing group biographies (I‘ve written four and my next book, Spellbound by Marcel:Duchamp, Love, and Art, will be another). I enjoy the intellectual scope they offer, the way they let you explore a world. I’m less interested in the details of individual lives than in the opportunity biography offers to explore social history, and group biography is particularly suited to that. They’re not easy to do, it’s no good putting down just one damn life after another, but I enjoy the challenge of finding the shape that will let me fit everyone’s personalities and ideas into a coherent story.
Cohen spent a year driving through America accompanied only by two crates of books. She realised, reading them, how many of their authors had met, more or less significantly, one another, from Mark Twain and Henry James to James Baldwin and Elizabeth Bishop. The result was this daisy-chain book. It’s fascinating, illuminating, and utterly charming.
Each chapter of A Chance Meeting takes up an actual encounter between two historical figures. As Rachel Cohen writes in her introduction: 'They met in ordinary ways - a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend's casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. They talked to each other for a few hours or for forty years, and later it seemed to them impossible that they could have missed each other.' A Chance Meeting opens with a young Henry James in the studio of the great Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, and captures the…
I’ve been interested in car culture since my anthropologist sister and I first began collaborating on a research and writing project on the topic over fifteen years ago. At that time, I had just moved from a transit-rich city to a car-dependent suburb and she had just moved from a suburb to a walkable city, which got us talking about just how much this singular object—the car—shaped our everyday lives. Carjackedwas published in 2010, and since then I’ve continued to read and write about transportation, although I also write a lot about education—another obsession for another list of recommended books.
I first learned about this book from the PBS documentary that was based on it, and it is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the complex history of the automobile in America, a history rife with contradictions. Sorin highlights how the advent of the car provided Black Americans with great freedom and opportunity (including through its role in the civil rights movement) but also came with severe risks and restrictions. I especially appreciated how the author’s family history deepened the broader, national story.
Driving While Black demonstrates that the car-the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility-has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Melding new archival research with her family's story, Gretchen Sorin recovers a lost history, demonstrating how, when combined with black travel guides-including the famous Green Book-the automobile encouraged a new way of resisting oppression.
As a bestselling and award-winning KidLit author of more than 100 books, I’ve been blessed to specialize in writing for kids about the amazing and inspiring legacy of African Americans. From an alphabet book for even the youngest readers to biographies with hands-on activities for middle graders and up, both nonfiction and fiction as well, these stories are my passion because many of these individuals are my personal heroes as well. I want kids to love and honor these men and women who have made a difference in our world as much as I do!
I met the author Andrea Davis Pinkney and her husband at a conference. I’ve always admired the Pinkney family and their award-winning books for children, so when Andrea shared about her book, I wanted an autographed copy for my own home library. A book for older readers, it contains the biographies of 10 amazing women who took a stand and made a difference in our world. The art is beautiful, too!
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus and sparked a boycott that changed America.Harriet Tubman helped more than three hundred slaves escape the South on the Underground Railroad.Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to the U.S.House of Representatives. The lives these women led are part of an incredible story about courage in the face of oppression; about the challenges and triumphs of the battle for civil rights; and about speaking out for what you believe in--even when it feels like no one is listening.Andrea Davis Pinkney's moving text and Stephen Alcorn's glorious portraits celebrate…
