Warren Hunting Smith Library: James Baldwin: Public Intellectual: Biographical Information

Christina Greer, PhD Explores the Life and Works of James Baldwin

In the 1960s, the FBI amassed almost 2,000 documents in an investigation into one of America’s most celebrated minds. The subject of this inquiry was a writer named James Baldwin, one of the best-selling Black authors in the world at the time. What made him loom so large in the imaginations of both the public and the authorities? Professor Greer provides an overview on Baldwin, and looks into his motivation for writing.

Directed by Jérémie Balais and Jeffig Le Bars

Selected Biographies and Anthologies

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James Baldwin: A Biography by David Leeming
Call Number: PS3552.A365 Z78 1994

In this biography, David Leeming creates an intimate portrait of a complex, troubled, driven, and brilliant man. He plumbs every aspect of Baldwin’s life: his relationships with the unknown and the famous, including painter Beauford Delaney, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and childhood friend Richard Avedon; his expatriate years in France and Turkey; his gift for compassion and love; the public pressures that overwhelmed his quest for happiness, and his passionate battle for black identity, racial justice, and to “end the racial nightmare and achieve our country.”
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and it's Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude
Call Number: E184.A1 G554 2020

Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America's ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. Eddie Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography--drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews--with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment.
Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin by James Campbell
Call Number: PS3552.A45 Z63 1991

An intimate portrait of James Baldwin's life. Baldwin was one of the most incisive and influential American writers of the 20th century. Active in the civil rights movement and open about his homosexuality, Baldwin was celebrated for eloquent analyses of social unrest in his essays and for daring portrayals of sexuality and interracial relationships in his fiction. For Talking at the Gates James Campbell interviewed many of Baldwin's friends and professional associates and examined several hundred pages of correspondence. Examining Baldwin's turbulent relationships with Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, Marlon Brando, Martin Luther King Jr., and others, this candid and original account portrays the life and work of a writer who held to the principle that "the unexamined life is not worth living."
Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France by Magdalena J. Zaborowska
Call Number: Online

The last 16 years of James Baldwin's life (1971-87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed "Chez Baldwin." In Me and My House Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin's home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works. Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and Black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk directly stem from Chez Baldwin's influence on the writer.

Selected Online Journal

Baldwin Review
James Baldwin Review (JBR) is an annual journal that brings together a wide array of peer‐reviewed critical and creative non-fiction on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin. In addition to these cutting-edge contributions, each issue contains a review of recent Baldwin scholarship and an award-winning graduate student essay.

This guide is based on "James Baldwin: Public Intellectual" created by Kofi Acree, Director of the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library. Adapted with permission from the author.