The Quarantine Tapes: Quotation Shorts - James Baldwin
Today’s Quotation is care of James Baldwin.
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James Baldwin — the grandson of a slave — was born in Harlem in 1924. The oldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty, developing a troubled relationship with his strict, religious stepfather. In 1948, at age 24, Baldwin left for Paris, where he hoped to find enough distance from the American society he grew up in to write about it.
Over the next ten years, Baldwin moved from Paris to New York to Istanbul, writing two books of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), as well as two novels, Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962). In the early 1960s, overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility to the times, Baldwin returned to take part in the civil rights movement. Traveling throughout the South, he began work on an explosive work about black identity and the state of racial struggle, The Fire Next Time (1963). This, too, was a bestseller: so incendiary that it put Baldwin on the cover of TIME Magazine. For many, Baldwin’s clarion call for human equality – in the essays of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time – became an early and essential voice in the civil rights movement.
By 1987, when he died of stomach cancer at age 63, James Baldwin had become one of the most important and vocal advocates for equality. From Go Tell It on the Mountain to The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), James Baldwin created works of literary beauty and depth that will remain essential parts of the American canon.
From https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/james-baldwin-about-the-author/59/.
For more information about James Baldwin:
“Sunday Reading: Celebrating James Baldwin”: https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/sunday-reading-celebrating-james-baldwin
“An Introduction to James Baldwin”: https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/introduction-james-baldwin
“The Best of James Baldwin: Favorite Pieces from the NPR Archive”:
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