How Did James Baldwin Died

How Did James Baldwin Died
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James Baldwin, a renowned writer who spent a lifetime in literature trying to explore his identity as a black and as an American, died Monday night at the age of 63 in his home in St. Paul de Vence in the south of France.
His death from cancer was announced Tuesday morning by Bernard Hassalle, a longtime companion and secretary.
The eldest son of a Harlem preacher, Baldwin, a small, slight man, was looked on for much of two decades both as a distinguished young American novelist and as a black essayist with the extraordinary, almost uncanny power of making his black experience meaningful to a white audience.
But, after the 1950s and 1960s, his reputation waned, perhaps because he had become too strident a black for white audiences, perhaps because he failed, like other American novelists of the 20th Century, to maintain the excitement and freshness of his earlier work.
But there is little doubt that his first novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” an autobiographical work about his youth in Harlem, and his first book of essays, “Notes of a Native Son,” a series exploring his life as a black living in Europe, made an unusual impact on the literary scene when published in 1953 and 1955. Both works are still highly regarded.
For a time during the 1960s, Baldwin was in the forefront of the civil rights movement, especially when he published his book of essays, “The Fire Next Time,” in 1963. Despite the title, Baldwin was actually appealing to whites of good will to join with blacks of good will in averting that fire.
“If we . . . do not falter in our duty now,” he wrote, “we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights leader and contender for the Democratic Party nomination for president, who knew Baldwin, called the author “a great source of inspiration” during the height of the civil rights movement. Interviewed in Chicago by the Associated Press, Jackson said Baldwin was a “prolific and sensitive writer” whose “voice was not watered down by political considerations.”
“He was a great advocate of personal and racial freedom,” Jackson said. “He was one of the giants.”
Fellow authors had high praise for Baldwin. “He was one of our best essayists in the best American gadfly tradition,” said Ralph Ellison, author of the novel “Invisible Man,” which deals with the struggles of a black youth in a hostile society.
“I think he managed to bring a great deal of elegance and eloquence to the subjects he chose.”
William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and other works, called Baldwin “a great talent.” He added, “He was a writer of such force when it came to issues that disturbed him.”
Baldwin was so much a symbol of the black experience during the height of the civil rights era that Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, soon after the inauguration of his brother, sought a meeting with the writer to discuss the future of civil rights. The meeting was not a happy one, for Robert Kennedy reportedly lost patience with Baldwin and refused to regard him as representative of the blacks of America.
Baldwin was born in Harlem on Aug. 2, 1924, the eldest of a preacher’s nine children. Intent on writing a novel and encouraged by his teachers in New York, Baldwin left for Paris in 1948. In Europe, he kept trying to understand “the West on to which I have been so strangely grafted.” Yet, living in Europe made him somehow feel more American, especially when he discovered that young American writers were just as alienated from European culture as he was.
“Negroes are Americans,” he wrote in “Notes of a Native Son,” “and their destiny is the country’s destiny. They have no other experience besides their experience on this continent, and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet remains to be embraced.”
Years later, however, his views turned bitter.
“Black people don’t believe anything white people say anymore,” he told the Associated Press in an interview in 1983. Black people better take care of themselves, he went on, because “no one else is going to do it.”
With his early successes, Baldwin left his poverty behind and could afford to alternate between living in France and the United States while writing novels, essays, poems and plays. Fourteen years ago, however, he decided to make his permanent and final home in St. Paul de Vence, a town of hills overlooking the Mediterranean Sea that had long been a favorite of painters in France.
Baldwin’s other best known works include “Giovanni’s Room,” a novel published in 1958; “Nobody Knows My Name,” a book of essays published in 1960; “Another Country,” a novel published in 1962, and “Blues for Mr. Charlie,” a play produced in 1964. His last novel, “Harlem Quartet,” was published this year.
Baldwin was one of the best-known American expatriates living in France, and his death inspired a front-page tribute Tuesday from Le Monde, France’s most influential newspaper. President Francois Mitterrand honored Baldwin last year by appointing him a commander in the Legion of Honor.
“Getting this award from the country that I have adopted,” Baldwin said at the time, “means that France has adopted me.”
Only a week ago, his novel, “Harlem Quartet,” had lost out by one vote in Paris for the Femina Prize for the best foreign novel of the year. But, a few hours after his death, the novel was awarded the French-American Friendship Prize, the only literary prize ever awarded to Baldwin in France.
Hassalle, who announced Baldwin’s death, said that funeral services will be held in New York on Friday.
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Alternate titles: James Arthur Baldwin

By

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Born:

August 2, 1924
New York City
New York

... (Show more)

Died:

December 1, 1987 (aged 63)
France

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Notable Works:

“Another Country”
“Blues for Mister Charlie”
“Giovanni’s Room”
“Go Tell It on the Mountain”
“Going to Meet the Man”
“If Beale Street Could Talk”
“Just Above My Head”
“Nobody Knows My Name”
“Notes of a Native Son”
“Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone”
“The Fire Next Time”
“The Price of the Ticket”

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Role In:

American civil rights movement

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James Baldwin wrote eloquently, thoughtfully, and passionately on the subject of race in America in novels, essays, and plays. He is perhaps best known for his books of essays, in particular Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963).
James Baldwin grew up in New York City ’s Harlem neighbourhood in an atmosphere of poverty and strict religious observance. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in 1942 but was otherwise self-taught.
James Baldwin’s novels included Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), Another Country (1962), and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974; film 2018). He wrote the plays The Amen Corner (1955) and Blues for Mister Charlie (1964).
James Baldwin lived in New York City until 1948, when he moved to Paris . He returned to the United States in 1957, and from 1969 he lived alternately in the south of France and in New York and New England in the U.S.
James Baldwin , in full James Arthur Baldwin , (born August 2, 1924, New York , New York—died December 1, 1987, Saint-Paul, France), American essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the United States and, later, through much of western Europe.
The eldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty in the Black ghetto of Harlem in New York City . From age 14 to 16 he was active during out-of-school hours as a preacher in a small revivalist church, a period he wrote about in his semiautobiographical first and finest novel , Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and in his play about a woman evangelist, The Amen Corner (performed in New York City, 1965).
After graduation from high school , he began a restless period of ill-paid jobs, self-study, and literary apprenticeship in Greenwich Village , the bohemian quarter of New York City. He left in 1948 for Paris, where he lived for the next eight years. (In later years, from 1969, he became a self-styled “transatlantic commuter,” living alternatively in the south of France and in New York and New England.) His second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), deals with the white world and concerns an American in Paris torn between his love for a man and his love for a woman. Between the two novels came a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955).
In 1957 he returned to the United States and became an active participant in the civil rights struggle that swept the nation. His book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), explores Black-white relations in the United States. This theme also was central to his novel Another Country (1962), which examines sexual as well as racial issues.
The New Yorker magazine gave over almost all of its November 17, 1962, issue to a long article by Baldwin on the Black Muslim separatist movement and other aspects of the civil rights struggle. The article became a best seller in book form as The Fire Next Time (1963). His bitter play about racist oppression, Blues for Mister Charlie (“Mister Charlie” being a Black term for a white man), played on Broadway to mixed reviews in 1964.
Though Baldwin continued to write until his death—publishing works including Going to Meet the Man (1965), a collection of short stories; the novels Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979); and The Price of the Ticket (1985), a collection of autobiographical writings—none of his later works achieved the popular and critical success of his early work.
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Baldwin Name Meaning. English: from a Germanic personal name composed of the elements bald 'bold', 'brave' + wine 'friend', which was extremely popular among the Normans and in Flanders in the early Middle Ages.
James Baldwin Net Worth: $85 Millions
In The Discovery of What it Means to be an American , James Baldwin tries to identify the specific qualities that officially make a person an American . What he discovers is that there is no single definition that encompasses the American identity; instead he finds it to be a very complex thing to define .
10 James Baldwin Books to Read in Your Lifetime
Notes of a Native Son. Shop Now. Giovanni's Room. amazon.com. Nobody Knows My Name. Shop Now. Another Country. Shop Now. The Fire Next Time. Shop Now. Going to Meet the Man: Stories. Shop Now. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. Shop Now. If Beale Street Could Talk. $11.99.
But what remained of the three-hundred-year-old farmhouse and the gatehouse, where Baldwin's Swiss lover , Lucien Happersberger, lived, had lapsed into a powerful state of disrepair.
Sonny's Blues . " Sonny's Blues " (1957) is a story written by James Baldwin, originally published in Partisan Review. The story contains the recollections of a black algebra teacher in 1950s Harlem as he reacts to his brother Sonny's drug addiction, arrest, and recovery.
If Beale Street Could Talk . If Beale Street Could Talk is a 1974 novel by American writer James Baldwin. His fifth novel (and 13th book overall), it is a love story set in Harlem in the early 1970s.
Baldwin had moved to France in the late 1940's to escape what he felt was the stifling racial bigotry of America.
Ferncliff Cemetery, New York, United States
Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada
James Baldwin lived in New York City until 1948, when he moved to Paris. He returned to the United States in 1957, and from 1969 he lived alternately in the south of France and in New York and New England in the U.S.
The essay's title comes from 'God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time ', a line from an African American spiritual that Baldwin uses as an epigraph for 'Down at the Cross'.
Baldwin first moved to France in 1948. He shuttled back and forth between France , the United States, Switzerland and Turkey until 1970, when he settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The medieval village, nestled between the Alps and the Côte d'Azur, was his home until his death in 1987.
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Subsequently, one may also ask, was James Baldwin ever married?
He was especially known for his essays on the black experience in America. Baldwin was born to a young single mother, Emma Jones, at Harlem Hospital. She reportedly never told him the name of his biological father. Jones married a Baptist minister named David Baldwin when James was about three years old.
Furthermore, what obstacles did Baldwin overcome? He found odd jobs and then lost them, washing dishes, wo
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How Did James Baldwin Died

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