Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin's first nonfiction book has become a classic. These searing essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and Americans abroad remain as powerful today as when they were written. "He named for me the things you feel but couldn't utter. . . . Jimmy's essays articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Still Relevant After 40 Years:
Notes of A Native Son, a series of essays written by James Baldwin in the late 40's and early 50s, still has many relevant things to say about the topics it covers, mainly race in America, nearly forty years after its publication. Baldwin takes on many subjects: he bites the hand of his former mentor, Richard Wright (in some old fashioned younger writer states why he is free from his older counselor style) in "Everybody's Protest Novel." Baldwin fights for the writer's right to create not from any political... more info
Baldwin is brilliant:
Baldwin's reasoning, deduction and ability to convey deeply personal thoughts with such command and authority are part of what make this book of essays so riveting.
In "Notes of a Native Son" I began to understand more about the author through his relationship, or lack of relationship, with his father. And in "Equal in Paris or Stranger in the Village," I was transported into a dimension of racial prejudice that I have never experienced through prose before. As powerful today as it was then. A must... more info
Classic American essays:
Originally published in 1955 these essays are now considered American classics. Baldwin writes with tremendous pain, humor, and insight into the situation of what was then , 'the Negro' in America. He writes with insight into the situation of the young writer striving to locate himself in relation to Western civilization as a whole-which he feels he can never wholly belong to as he strives to belong to it. He writes most powerfully about the day of the dying of his father, and the birth of his youngest... more info
Greatest American book of essays written in the twentieth century:
Baldwin writes with a force and an eloquence that will take your breath away mastery--a powerful preacher on the page. What he has to say about the state of race relations in this country is still relevant today, almost half a century after this book was first published. I consider Baldwin our greatest twentieth-century African American writer and one of the greatest American writers ever. He is courageous, passionate, visionary, and a masterful writer.
