Where To Start With James Baldwin Books
In No Name in the Street Baldwin writes “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” This sentiment rings true time and again throughout Baldwin’s work as he shined a light on racism and prejudice in all its forms. What remains constant through each of these works is Baldwin’s passion for equality, justice, and social change. Explore the works of one of the most brilliant literary figures of the past century with this list of his novels, plays, and essays. Listen to The Baldwin 100 podcast. Brought to you by Penguin Random House and the James Baldwin Family, this show examines the life and work of iconic author and Civil Rights activist James Baldwin, as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth. For more great reads by Black voices, explore the All Ways Black book guide, then follow @AllWaysBlack on Instagram to join the conversation.
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Add to BookshelfThe Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name in the Street; The Devil FindsWork
by James Baldwin
This Everyman’s Library collection includes his bestselling, galvanizing essay The Fire Next Time — which gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s and still lights the way to understanding race in America today — along with three additional brilliant works of nonfiction by this seminal chronicler and analyst of culture.
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Vintage Baldwin
by James Baldwin
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.
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The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin
A stirring, intimate reflection on the nature of race and American nationhood that has inspired generations of writers and thinkers, first published in 1963, the same year as the March on Washington.
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Giovanni’s Room (Deluxe Edition)
by James Baldwin
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 deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
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If Beale Street Could Talk
by James Baldwin
If Beale Street Could Talk is a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime. In a novel that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.
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Another Country
by James Baldwin
A novel of sexual, racial, political, artistic passions, set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France. Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, Black people and white people, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.
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I Am Not Your Negro
by James Baldwin and Raoul Peck
In his final years, one of America’s greatest writers envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project had never been published before acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined them to compose his Academy Award-nominated documentary.
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
A coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old boy questioning the terms of his identity, the racism he faces, and the double-edged role of religion in his life. In prose that mingles gritty vernacular cadences with exalted biblical rhythms, Baldwin’s rendering of his young protagonist’s struggle to invent himself pioneered new possibilities in American language and literature.
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The Amen Corner
by James Baldwin
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.
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Blues for Mister Charlie
by James Baldwin
An award-winning play about a murder in a small Southern town, loosely based on the 1955 killing of Emmett Till. Here James 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.
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Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
by James Baldwin
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. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is overpowering in its vitality and extravagant in the intensity of its feeling.
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Going to Meet the Man
by James Baldwin
In this modern classic, “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 detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water.
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Nobody Knows My Name
by James Baldwin
Told with Baldwin’s characteristically unflinching honesty, this “splendid book” (The New York Times) offers illuminating, deeply felt essays on topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society.
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No Name in the Street
by James Baldwin
In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness and the later events that scored his heart with pain — the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.
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One Day When I Was Lost
by James Baldwin
A rare, lucidly composed screenplay based on the bestselling classic The Autobiography of Malcolm X. With spare, elegant, yet forceful dialogue and fresh, precise camera directions, Baldwin breathes cinematic life into this controversial and important figure, offering a new look at a man who changed himself in order to change the country.
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The Cross of Redemption
by James Baldwin
A collection of essays, articles, reviews, and interviews that have never before been gathered in a single volume. 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.
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The Devil Finds Work
by James Baldwin
From “the best essayist in this country” (The New York Times Book Review) comes an incisive book-length essay about racism in American movies that challenges the underlying assumptions in many of the films that have shaped our consciousness.
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Native Sons
by James Baldwin and Sol Stein
James Baldwin was beginning to be recognized as the most brilliant Black writer of his generation when his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, established his reputation in 1955. No one was more pleased by the book’s reception than Baldwin’s high school friend Sol Stein. A rising editor, novelist, and playwright, Stein had suggested that Baldwin do the book and coaxed his old friend through the long and sometimes agonizing process of putting the volume together. Now, in this fascinating book, Stein documents the story of his intense creative partnership with Baldwin through newly uncovered letters, photos, inscriptions, and an illuminating memoir of the friendship that resulted in one of the classics of American literature.
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Just Above My Head
by James Baldwin
The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this stunning, unforgettable novel. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the forbidden passion of Giovanni’s Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses — and a living contemporary history of Black struggle in this land.
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