James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist. His essays, collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in the Western society of the United States during the mid-twentieth century. Some of Baldwin's essays are book-length, including The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976). An unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, was expanded and adapted for cinema as the Academy Award-nominated documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016). One of his novels, If Beale Street Could Talk, was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film of the same name in 2018, directed and produced by Barry Jenkins.
Baldwin's novels, short stories, and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures. Themes of masculinity, sexuality, race and class intertwine to create intricate narratives that run parallel with some of the major political movements toward social change in mid-twentieth-century America, such as the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. Baldwin's protagonists are often but not exclusively African American, and gay and bisexual men frequently feature as protagonists in his literature. These characters often face internal and external obstacles in their search for social- and self-acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, which was written in 1956, well before the gay liberation movement.
James Baldwin (disambiguation) Another author with Similar Names
James Baldwin (1841–1925) was born in Indiana, United States, and made a career as an educator and administrator in that state starting at the age of 24. He served as the superintendent of Indiana's school system for 18 years and then went on to become a widely published textbook editor and children's author in the subjects of legends, mythology, biography, and literature, among others. Baldwin was one of the most prolific authors of school books for children at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In addition to the Baldwin Readers (1897), he co-authored the Harper Readers (1888) and the Expressive Readers (1911). He wrote over thirty books about famous people in history and retold classical stories. His publications numbered 54 volumes. It is estimated that 26 million copies of his works sold worldwide, including in China and Indonesia. A self-educated man, he became a school superintendent before working as an editor for Harper's and later for the American Book Company. He wrote more than fifty books, including Fifty Famous Stories Retold (1896) and Abraham Lincoln, a True Life (1904). Less
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