James Baldwin

Personal and prophetic, these essays uncover what it means to live in a racist American society with insights that feel as fresh today as they did over the four decades in which he composed them....

James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil-rights movement with his eloquent manifesto....

The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem....

James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel with a new introduction, Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality.

Here are 50 famous stories of long-ago times, retold in a short form for all young people. These are tales of valor, bravery, and kindness, as well as high adventure....

James Baldwin's haunting coming-of-age story, with a new introduction by Roxane Gay.

First published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race, and liberal America in the 1960s, taking on the then-taboo themes of interracial couples, bisexuality, and extramarital affairs....

James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name records the last months of this famed American writer's 10-year self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem, and his first trip south....

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 listeners....

Legendary tales of the lives of famous people and historic episodes....

Baldwin's personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics....

From one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century—a masterpiece of the modern American theater: a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons.

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the 20th century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic....

A major work of American literature from a major American writer, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone powerfully portrays the anguish of being Black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war.

Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and is imprisoned....

This stunningly personal document displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works....

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level....

James Baldwin gives an electrifying reading about a young gay American in Paris recalling a dramatic and transforming incident from his boyhood, as he struggles to accept his sexual identity....

In the first passage James Baldwin reads with passion about the suicide of a young black man in despair....

Includes fifty legendary tales depicting certain romantic episodes in the lives of well-known heroes and famous men, or in the history of a people...