James Baldwin: A Biography Kindle Edition
by David Adams Leeming (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars (998)
James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canon—Go Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen—he explored issues of race and racism in America, class distinction, and sexual difference. A gay, African American writer who was born in Harlem, he found the freedom to express himself living in exile in Paris. When he returned to America to cover the Civil Rights movement, he became an activist and controversial spokesman for the movement, writing books that became bestsellers and made him a celebrity, landing him on the cover of Time.
In this biography, which Library Journal called “indispensable,” 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.”
Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
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Print length
612 pages
Product details
ASIN : B00R3L75XO
Publisher : Arcade
Accessibility : Learn more
Publication date : 24 February 2015
Edition : Reprint
Language : English
File size : 5.3 MB
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 612 pages
ISBN-13 : 978-1628724691
Page Flip : Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: 292,911 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)115 in Artist & Architect Biographies
164 in Discrimination & Racism Studies (Kindle Store)
170 in African American Studies
Customer Reviews:
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars (998)
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Customer reviews
4.7 out of 5 stars
Mike
5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic readReviewed in Canada on 7 August 2020
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Easily one of the best books I've read. I'm a fan of Baldwin's work, and this privileged look at his entire life is fascinating and exciting. I honestly didn't want this book to end. But when it did, wow. Heartbreaking.
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Paul Frandano
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb Account of Tormented GeniusReviewed in the United States on 14 November 2018
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
I'm old enough to remember the Freedom Riders, and the sit-ins, and Bull Connor, and Martin and Malcolm and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and so much more, all in black and white on a 19 inch Zenith. I've received unsubtle guidance and reading material from African-American comrades in arms during our Vietnam era military service. I've studied the history of the movement with a militant professor. I thought I had a reasonable, historically informed view of racism in America.
Then I read Jimmy Baldwin, and this marvelous biography, and my world shifted.
Baldwin saw himself as prophetic, and history bears his prophecies out. In one important essay after another, and then in his novels, Baldwin's analysis early in the 1960s of "the Negro problem" - as a "White problem" and as a perpetuation of racist mythologies that denigrate African Americans and elevate any and all whites (long before any talk of "white privilege" and its analysis, loosely analogous to that of Baldwin) - remains as cogent today as the day it was written.
Biographer David Leeming was in an ideal position to render Baldwin the justice he fully deserves. Leeming does indefatigable service to his friend and sometime employer, combing the archives, reading every draft, all the unpublished manuscripts, letters, notes, outlines, tracking down and interviewing Baldwin intimates, casual acquaintances, editors, colleagues, drinking companions, lovers, and on and on, hiding nothing (apart from the occasional Baldwin paramour, in the interest of privacy) and placing Baldwin's life in superb context, showing, in detail after detail, how Baldwin, the consummate auto-novelist, placed his life and beliefs completely, exhaustively, redundantly, in myriad variations, on the page, and then walked the talk.
Essential as both a tale of a turbulent time in our national life - with the awakening of the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and into the 1960s, a time of courageous protest, daring activism, horrific suppression, riots, assassinations, and waxing and waning political courage - and as a literary biography of a wholly self-made genius, who knew and befriended all the principal civil rights activists and who was himself the center of a literal movable literary feast - the list of Baldwin's prominent friends and admirers is a Who's Who of the times - from his early days in a Harlem ghetto, through three years as "boy preacher" who then left the church and his father's home on the same day, and on to international fame and literary acclaim as perhaps the most formidable bad conscience of his time.
Leeming's work also passes muster as a commentary on Baldwin's novels, albeit from a very favorably biased point of view and at sometimes too great a length, with spoilers abounding. Still, Leeming gives Baldwin's critics their say, even as he guides his readers back to the Baldwin oeuvre. Leeming provides the extensive, deeply knowledgeable baseline from which all Baldwin biographers must begin. More importantly for me, Leeming's biography makes a strong case for the significance of Baldwin's late novels, which have generally had more deteractors than admirers among the literary chattering classes, and has fortified me with a determination to read Baldwin's entire published catalogue, or at very least the three Library of America volumes (of which I've made progress in two).
David Leeming has given us a profoundly sympathetic portrait of a complex, tormented man and how that man transformed his pain into art. It is an unusually candid, absolutely essential work on the life and work of a remarkable - and remarkably prophetic - human being.
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Tony C (London)
5.0 out of 5 stars WonderfulReviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 November 2015
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
I'm not black or gay, but this biography, written with clear eyes but also much love by one of Baldwin's close friends, who lived with him and worked for him, resonated with me. James Baldwin, with his rickety private life, his depression, and his rage, was a great man who devoted his life to the quest for love , and to making sense of his cultural inheritance. An extraordinary man. Look up the YouTube videos -- his speech to the Cambridge Student Union when he took part in a debate with the right wing commentator Buckley (Baldwin got a standing ovation), or the interview with Mavis ?? when one of his plays opened in London. A great man....
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Rosie
5.0 out of 5 stars A good readReviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 October 2017
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
A good read & really informative both about James Baldwin's life & also giving background to the novels.
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LL
5.0 out of 5 stars A man of letters and Voice who still matters today.Reviewed in the United States on 30 March 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Fascinating read about the life of a literary icon who battled oppression (sexual and racial). Baldwin was eloquent as a speaker and debater as well. You get a sense of the streets he walked in NYC and Paris.
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A profound and courageous life told by a beloved friend
Melinda
2 Feb 2022
Good reading of high-quality biography
Rodney Wetherell
24 Mar 2019
2 people found this helpful
Excellent bio
Anonymous
1 Jan 2025
Fascinating exploration into Baldwins life and works
wayne hawkins
3 Aug 2023
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