James Baldwin: Public Intellectual

Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin's timeless and moving essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad inaugurated him as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the 20th century.

This book is a collection of essays by James Baldwin published in 1961. It serves as a sequel to his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and explores Baldwin's experiences as an African-American author in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The essays delve into various topics, including race relations, desegregation, homosexuality, life in the U.S. South, police brutality, and French intellectual life.

Baldwin expresses the anger and frustration felt by Black Americans. It is an exploration of race, identity, and the human condition in America. Published in 1963, this seminal work consists of two essays: "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" and "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind."

Nothing Personal is published alongside photographs by Richard Avedon. James Baldwin's essay is a critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement. It brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, police, and his deep probe into the American condition. This book is both a eulogy and a declaration of will.
In 2021 a stand-alone edition of, Nothing Personal was published.

This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works.  In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness, 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 retum to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

Essayist James Baldwin examines racism in American movies. Challenges the underlying assumptions in films such as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist. Explores the love, hate, bias, cruelty, fear, and ignorance reflected in films that have shaped the national consciousness.

James Baldwin explores the Atlanta child murders that took place over a period of twenty-two months in 1979 and 1980 through a lens of race, justice, and the ongoing struggle for equality in America. He critiques the city's perceived "too busy to hate" attitude and the racial implications within the case, including the Black administration, the murdered Black children, and the Black man, Wayne Williams, who was arrested for the crimes. Baldwin uses the Atlanta murders as a microcosm to explore broader issues of racial stagnation and the American dream, ultimately questioning the nation's commitment to justice for all.

This collection of nonfiction essays written by James Baldwin between 1948 and 1985, uncover what it means to live in a racist American society with insights that feel as relevant today as they did over the 4 decades in which he composed them. The collection also provides the perfect entrée into Baldwin's prescient commentary on race, sexuality, and identity in an unjust American society. Along with 46 additional pieces, it includes the full text of dozens of famous essays from such books as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Devil Finds Work.