Vintage Baldwin

Informationen zum Autor James Baldwin (19241987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were bestsellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. Klappentext In his internationally acclaimed novels, short stories, plays and essays, James Baldwin was and remains a powerfully prophetic voice in the American literary landscape, fearlessly brooding upon issues such as race, sex, politics, and art. His literary achievement is a lasting legacy about what it means to be American. Vintage Baldwin includes the short story "Sonny's Blues"; the galvanizing civil rights examination "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation"; the essays "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem," "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," and "Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South"; and excerpts from the novel Another Country and the play The Amen Corner. Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions. Leseprobe My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation Dear James: I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody-with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy. I am sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards holiness: you really are of another era, part of what happened when the Negro left the land and came into what the late E. Franklin Frazier called "the cities of destruction." You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger . I tell you this because I love you, and please don't you ever forget it. I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother's so easily wiped away. But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my c...

“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

“This author retains a place in an extremely select group; that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers.” —*Saturday Review

“He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being —which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer.” *—*The Nation

“He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing . . . the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought.” *—Langston Hughes

“He has become one of the few writers of our time.” —Norman Mailer

Autorentext

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections *Notes of a Native Son *and *The Fire Next Time *were bestsellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.

Klappentext

In his internationally acclaimed novels, short stories, plays and essays, James Baldwin was and remains a powerfully prophetic voice in the American literary landscape, fearlessly brooding upon issues such as race, sex, politics, and art. His literary achievement is a lasting legacy about what it means to be American.

Vintage Baldwin includes the short story "Sonny's Blues"; the galvanizing civil rights examination "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation"; the essays "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem," "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," and "Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South"; and excerpts from the novel Another Country and the play The Amen Corner.

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions.

Zusammenfassung
**The best of the best from a powerful voice in the American literary landscape who fearlessly tackled race, sex, politics, and art in his internationally acclaimed novels, short stories, plays, and essays. 

“[Baldwin] uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing...the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought.” —Langston Hughes

James Baldwin was and remains a powerfully prophetic voice in the American literary landscape. His literary achievement is a lasting legacy about what it means to be American.

Vintage Baldwin includes the short story “Sonny’s Blues”; the galvanizing civil rights examination “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation”; the essays “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” and “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South”; and excerpts from the novel Another Country and the play The Amen Corner.

“If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.” —Michael Ondaatje

Leseprobe
My Dungeon Shook:

Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation

Dear James:
…