Introduction

Summary

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

—James Baldwin, “Northern Protestant”

IT IS DIFFICULT TO CONSIDER a survey of African American literature or the development of black intellectual thought in the twentieth century without some mention of James Baldwin. His short story “Sonny's Blues” remains a perennial favorite in literature anthologies and all of Baldwin's essay collections and novels remain in print. His first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, is a seminal work that led a new generation of African American writers out from under the shadow of Richard Wright. The Fire Next Time is one of the most profound and accurate articulations of black consciousness during the civil rights movement. Readers and critics alike, for the past sixty years, generally agree that James Baldwin is a major African American writer. What they do not agree on is why. As a result, the reception of James Baldwin has been equal parts critical devotion and critical neglect.

Writing in Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985), Trudier Harris laments that despite being “one of America's best-known writers, and certainly one of its best-known black writers, [Baldwin] has not attained a more substantial place in the scholarship on Afro-American writers” (3–4). Craig Werner asserts that “the general silence [on Baldwin's work in African American literary criticism] suggests that the larger changes in intellectual fashion have influenced the internal dynamics of discourse on Afro-American culture” (“The Economic Evolution of James Baldwin,” 107). For example, the teacher's guide that accompanied the first edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, which includes a number of Baldwin's selections, failed to include James Baldwin in its list of major authors who “have an undeniable genius or panache that uniquely distills the best [the] tradition has to offer.” Manning Marable's 2003 collection of political black writing, Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices on Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, a collection Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls “a broad compilation of the signal primary sources through which black people articulated both their always shifting and always various definitions of what, precisely, a black identity is, as well as the most efficacious methods through which to achieve our freedom,” fails to mention Baldwin at all (quote from back cover).