James Baldwin author photo
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James Baldwin

출생: August 02, 1924 – New York City, New York, United States

James Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, and public intellectual whose work examined race, sexuality, identity, and religion in the United States. Best known for Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Notes of a Native Son, and The Fire Next Time, he became a defining literary voice of the civil rights era.

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James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924 and grew up in poverty in a large household shaped by the stern authority of his stepfather, a storefront preacher. Early brilliance in school brought him to the attention of teachers and writers, including Countee Cullen, and language became both refuge and instrument. As a teenager Baldwin preached in church, but he eventually rejected the pulpit, concluding that religious performance could mask rather than resolve suffering. That break was one of the first decisive turns in his life. Another came in 1948, when, exhausted by racism and economic precarity in the United States, he left for Paris. Distance gave him room to see America more clearly and to begin forming the voice that would make him one of the twentieth century’s central essayists and novelists.

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quote
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise
-Letter from a Region in My Mind
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When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know
-The Art of Fiction No. 78
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The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated
-A Talk to Teachers
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The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness
-The Creative Process
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I don't think, if I may be harsh, that any white American has the right to such innocence
-Free and brave
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The problem now is - how are you going to save yourselves?
-A Conversation With James Baldwin
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The measure of one's dignity depends on one's estimate of oneself
-Living and growing in a white world
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It is the highest duty of a man or a woman to become a moral human being
-Lecture by James Baldwin on the Writer's Responsibility

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"James Baldwin was born for truth"

Maya Angelou

"Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin"

Langston Hughes

"James Baldwin is a skillful writer, a man of fine intelligence and a true companion in the desire to make life human"

Irving Howe

"If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one"

Michael Ondaatje

"To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, America, the Negro, the white man—to be forced to understand so much"

Alfred Kazin

"As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro question James Baldwin has no equals"

F. W. Dupee

"If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was the civil rights movement's Moses, James Baldwin had become its Jeremiah"

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