Subtitled "Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985," this is the largest single gathering of Baldwin's essays published in his lifetime, assembled near the end of his career. It reprints in full the books Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Devil Finds Work, together with dozens of shorter pieces — reviews, portraits, and polemics written over nearly four decades — and a new introduction written for this volume. Read whole, it traces one writer's changing account of race, exile, faith, sexuality, and American power, from a 1948 book review to the civil-rights years and beyond. It remains a standard one-volume route into Baldwin the essayist, as distinct from Baldwin the novelist.
Author: James Baldwin · Original publisher: St. Martin's Press (New York), 1985
