James Baldwin

On James Baldwin by Colm Tóibín

March 2025, no. 473

Colm Tóibín has that special distinction among contemporary writers of being both a first-rate novelist and an acutely discerning critic. In recent years, as well as publishing some magnificent novels, among them Brooklyn (2009), Nora Webster (2014), and Long Island (2024), he has written searching critical studies of other writers, including Elizabeth Bishop (2015). His latest critical work, On James Baldwin, was published in 2024 to coincide with the centenary of Baldwin’s birth. It grew out of the Mandel Lectures in the Humanities that Tóibín delivered at Brandeis University, but it also draws on a long and passionate engagement with Baldwin’s work, including an essay on Baldwin and Barack Obama published in the New York Review of Books in 2008.

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James Baldwin this time

by Australian Book Review •

The ABR Podcast

This week on the ABR Podcast, Paul Kane marks the centenary of James Baldwin with an essay on this indispensable prophet. Kane tells us: ‘Baldwin insisted that the only way forward, the only way out [for America], was through a renovation of the self, and this could only be accomplished through deep communication and empathy’. Paul Kane is Professor Emeritus as Vassar College in upstate New York. Listen to Paul Kane’s ‘James Baldwin this time: The centenary of an indispensable prophet’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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James Baldwin this time

by Paul Kane •

August 2024, no. 467

In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois famously declared: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’ He meant not only in the United States but also elsewhere in the world. As for this century, in America, at least, we can now say it remains the dominant problem. The very fact, for instance, of a movement named ‘Black Lives Matter’ – now a decade old – speaks to something unspeakable: an obvious and overt racism that is driving America to a reckoning.

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The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the debate over race in America by Nicholas Buccola

by Samuel Watts •

April 2020, no. 420

Samuel Watts reviews 'The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the debate over race in America' by Nicholas Buccola

Rising to the lectern amid a tightly packed crowd in the Cambridge Union’s debating hall, James Baldwin began quietly and slowly to speak. ‘I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of Jeremiah.’ It was February 1965, and Baldwin was in the United Kingdom to promote his third novel, Another Country (1962). Baldwin’s British publicist had asked the Union if they would host the author. Peter Fullerton, the Union’s president, was quick to seize this opportunity, on one condition: that Baldwin participate in a debate.

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