The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings Read online

  “Mother by Maxim Gorky.” Originally appeared as “Battle Hymn.” New Leader, November 29, 1947.

  “The Amboy Dukes by Irving Shulman.” Originally appeared as “When the War Hit Brownsville.” New Leader, May 17, 1947.

  “The Sure Hand of God by Erskine Caldwell.” Originally appeared as “The Dead Hand of Caldwell.” New Leader, December 6, 1947.

  “The Sling and the Arrow by Stuart Engstrand.” Originally appeared as “Without Grisly Gaiety.” New Leader, September 20, 1947.

  “Novels and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by V. S. Pritchett; and Robert Louis Stevenson by David Daiches.” Originally appeared as “Bright World Darkened.” New Leader, January 24, 1948.

  “Flood Crest by Hodding Carter.” Originally appeared as “Change Within a Channel.” New Leader, April 24, 1948.

  “The Moth by James M. Cain.” Originally appeared as “Modern Rover Boys.” New Leader, August 14, 1948.

  “The Portable Russian Reader, edited by Bernard Guilbert Guerney.” Originally appeared as “Literary Grab-Bag.” New Leader, February 28, 1948.

  “The Person and the Common Good by Jacques Maritain.” Originally appeared as “Present and Future.” New Leader, March 13, 1948.

  “The Negro Newspaper by Vishnu V. Oak; Jim Crow America by Earl Conrad; The High Cost of Prejudice by Bucklin Moon; The Protestant Church and the Negro by Frank S. Loescher; Color and Conscience by Buell G. Gallagher; From Slavery to Freedom by John Hope Franklin; and The Negro in America by Arnold Rose.” Originally appeared as “Too Late, Too Late.” Commentary, January 1949.

  “The Cool World by Warren Miller.” Originally appeared as “War Lord of the Crocodiles.” New York Times Book World, January 21, 1959.

  “Essays by Seymour Krim.” Originally appeared as “Views of a Near-Sighted Cannoneer.” The Village Voice, July 13, 1961.

  “The Arrangement by Elia Kazan.” Originally appeared as “God’s Country.” New York Review, March 23, 1967.

  “A Man’s Life: An Autobiography by Roger Wilkins.” Originally appeared as “Roger Wilkins: A Black Man’s Odyssey in White America.” The Washington Post Book World, June 6, 1982.

  “The Death of a Prophet.” Commentary, March 1950.

  JAMES BALDWIN

  James Baldwin was born in 1924. He is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among the awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986. He died in 1987.

  ALSO BY JAMES BALDWIN

  Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Giovanni’s Room (1956)

  Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

  Another Country (1962)

  The Fire Next Time (1963)

  Nothing Personal (with Richard Avedon) (1964)

  Blues for Mister Charlie (1964)

  Going to Meet the Man (1965)

  The Amen Corner (1968)

  Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968)

  One Day When I Was Lost (1972)

  No Name in the Street (1972)

  If Beale Street Could Talk (1973)

  The Devil Finds Work (1976)

  Little Man, Little Man (with Yoran Cazac) (1976)

  Just Above My Head (1979)

  The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985)

  Jimmy’s Blues (1985)

  The Price of the Ticket (1985)

  ALSO BY JAMES BALDWIN

  THE AMEN CORNER

  For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when her estranged husband, Luke, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path. The Amen Corner is an uplifting, sorrowful, and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater.

  Drama

  ANOTHER COUNTRY

  Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic—that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at their most elemental and sublime.

  Fiction/Literature

  BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE

  In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race. For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a “boy” like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. In Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.

  Fiction/Literature

  THE DEVIL FINDS WORK

  Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist. Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness.

  African American Studies

  THE CROSS OF REDEMPTION

  The Cross of Redemption is a revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society. Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity.

  Essays/African American Studies

  THE FIRE NEXT TIME

  A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document.

  Social Science/African American Studies

  GIOVANNI’S ROOM

  Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

  Fiction/Literature

  GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN

  Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935.

  Fiction/Literature

  GOING TO MEET THE MAN

  “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, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often de
sperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.

  Fiction/Literature

  IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

  Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions—affection, despair, and hope.

  Fiction/Literature

  NO NAME IN THE STREET

  A searing memoir and an extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies, No Name in the Street is James Baldwin’s powerful commentary on the political and social agonies of America’s contemporary history. The prophecies of The Fire Next Time have been tragically realized—through assassinations, urban riots, and increased racial polarization—and the hope for justice seems more elusive than ever. Through it all, Baldwin’s uncompromising vision and his fierce disavowal of despair are ever present in this eloquent and personal testament to his times.

  Nonfiction

  NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME

  Nobody Knows My Name is a collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays on topics ranging from race relations in the United States—including a passionate attack on William Faulkner for his ambivalent views about the segregated South—to the role of the writer in society, with personal accounts of such writers as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer.

  Literature/African American Studies

  TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN’S BEEN GONE

  In this magnificently passionate, angry, and tender novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters, a man struggling to become himself even as he juggles multiple identities—as black man, bisexual, and artist—on the mercilessly floodlit stage of American public life. At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo’s childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo’s loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war.

  Fiction/Literature

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