Notes of a Native Son

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time, from his home in The Harlem Ghetto to a sobering Journey to Atlanta.

Table of Contents:
Introduction by Edward P. Jones Acknowledgments Preface to the 1984 Edition Autobiographical Notes  Part One Everybody's Protest Novel Many Thousands Gone Carmen Jones: The Dark is Light Enough Part Two The Harlem Ghetto Journey to Atlanta Notes of a Native Son Part Three Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown A Question of Identity Equal in Paris Stranger in the Village

About the Author :
James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, an essayist, a playwright, a poet, and a social critic, and one of America’s foremost writers. His writing explores the palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-twentieth-century America. He is the author of several novels and books of nonfiction, including Notes of a Native Son, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, Just Above My Head, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen, and of the poetry collection Jimmy’s Blues.

Review :
“The wonderful thing about writers like Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages that are so arresting we become breathless and have to raise our eyes from the page to keep from being spirited away.” —Edward P. Jones, from his new introduction   “Written with bitter clarity and uncommon grace.” —Time   “A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity.” —Langston Hughes, The New York Times Book Review   “He named for me the things you feel but couldn’t utter . . . articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr.   “I owe a tremendous debt to the example of his work.” —John Edgar Wideman   “Baldwin’s vision, his humor, his tragically beautiful style, make this a book [to] . . . turn to for a long time.” —Kay Boyle, The American Scholar