Baldwin died of stomach cancer in 1987 in Saint Paul de Vence, France.Īlthough Paris is generally recognized and celebrated as one of Europe’s LGBT hubs, the city wasn’t always such an inclusive place.
Baldwin worked for the last 10 years of his life in France, penning a number of essential works about American identity in the wake of the assassinations of civil rights activists Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. This was the beginning of his celebrated career as an outspoken activist and socially-conscious public thinker, advocating for peaceful resolutions of America’s racial tensions. Baldwin returned to America in 1957, at which point he became involved with the Civil Rights Movement. The result came in 1953, when he published Go Tell It on the Mountain. Baldwin moved to Paris in 1948 with the hopes of both physically and psychologically distancing himself from America so that he could write about his country more clearly. Around this time, the famous novelist Richard Wright identified Baldwin’s talent and helped him earn a grant in order to work on a novel and sustain himself while doing so. Upon graduating high school, Baldwin spent the majority of his time in Greenwich Village-at that time a hotbed of creativity and progressive thinking-working as a book reviewer. He calls upon this experience in his most celebrated novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, as well as in the play The Amen Corner.
In retrospect, Baldwin identified his time in the church-preparing and delivering several sermons per week-as an important step in his development as a writer, since in this role he was forced to closely consider a wide range of human emotions. Over the years, Baldwin’s relationship with David would prove tenuous yet formative, since his eventual experience as a Youth Minister in an opposing church was both a result and a defiance of his stepfather’s example as a Baptist preacher.
Though his biological father was absent, a Baptist minister named David Baldwin soon became the young author’s stepfather. James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924, the grandson of a slave and the eldest of nine children.
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