From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century comes a groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love--a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction (The Atlantic).

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.

David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni's curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella's return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy.

David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night--the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movementin the 1960s--and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. - The finest essay I've ever read. --Ta-Nehisi Coates

At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two letters, written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.

Described by The New York Times Book Review as sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle ... all presented in searing, brilliant prose, The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of literature.

A deluxe edition of James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel, with a new introduction by Kevin Young and special cover art designed by Baldwin's friend and contemporary Beauford Delaney

Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells a deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime--a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless (The New York Times Book Review).

One of the best books Baldwin has ever written--perhaps the best of all. --The Philadelphia Inquirer

Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions--affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this truly extraordinary novel (Chicago Sun-Times).

Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.

#26 on The Guardian's list of 100 best nonfiction books of all time, the essays explore what it means to be Black in America

In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. With films like I Am Not Your Negro and the forthcoming If Beale Street Could Talk bringing renewed interest to Baldwin's life and work, Notes of a Native Son serves as a valuable introduction.

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time, from his home in The Harlem Ghetto to a sobering Journey to Atlanta.

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic. His criticism on topics such as the paternalism of white progressives or on his own friend Richard Wright's work is pointed and unabashed. He was also one of the few writing on race at the time who addressed the issue with a powerful mixture of outrage at the gross physical and political violence against black citizens and measured understanding of their oppressors, which helped awaken a white audience to the injustices under their noses. Naturally, this combination of brazen criticism and unconventional empathy for white readers won Baldwin as much condemnation as praise.

Notes is the book that established Baldwin's voice as a social critic, and it remains one of his most admired works. The essays collected here create a cohesive sketch of black America and reveal an intimate portrait of Baldwin's own search for identity as an artist, as a black man, and as an American.

A deluxe edition of James Baldwin's haunting coming-of-age story, with a new introduction by Roxane Gay and special cover art designed by Baldwin's friend and contemporary Beauford Delaney

Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.

From one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century--a novel of sexual, racial, political, artistic passions, set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France.

Brilliant and fiercely told.--The New York Times

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read.

A stunning edition of James Baldwin's timeless novel, with a new introduction by bestselling novelist Brit Bennett and special cover art designed by Baldwin's friend and contemporary Beauford Delaney

From one of our greatest writers, James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk is a profoundly moving novel about love in the face of injustice that is as socially resonant today as it was when it was first published. Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions--affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

A major hardcover compendium of nonfiction by one of America's most brilliant essayists, timed to the celebration of his centenary

Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual James Baldwin is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This Everyman's Library collection includes his bestselling, galvanizing essay The Fire Next Time--which gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s and still lights the way to understanding race in America today--along with three additional brilliant works of nonfiction by this seminal chronicler and analyst of culture. From No Name In the Street's extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies to the passionate, probing, controversial (The Atlantic) Nobody Knows My Name and the incisive criticism of American movies in The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin's stunning prose over and over proves relevant to our contemporary struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Over twenty-two months in 1979 and 1981 nearly two dozen children were unspeakably murdered in Atlanta despite national attention and outcry; they were all Black. James Baldwin investigated these murders, the Black administration in Atlanta, and Wayne Williams, the Black man tried for the crimes. Because there was only evidence to convict Williams for the murders of two men, the children's cases were closed, offering no justice to the families or the country. Baldwin's incisive analysis implicates the failures of integration as the guilt party, arguing, There could be no more devastating proof of this assault than the slaughter of the children.

As Stacey Abrams writes in her foreword, The humanity of black children, of black men and women, of black lives, has ever been a conundrum for America. Forty years on, Baldwin's writing reminds us that we have never resolved the core query: Do black lives matter? Unequivocally, the moral answer is yes, but James Baldwin refuses such rhetorical comfort. In this, his last book, by excavating American race relations Baldwin exposes the hard-to-face ingrained issues and demands that we all reckon with them.

James Baldwin's critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and police brutality to a new generation of readers.

Available for the first time in a stand-alone edition, Nothing Personal is Baldwin's deep probe into the American condition. Considering the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020--which were met with tear gas and rubber bullets the same year white supremacists entered the US Capitol with little resistance, openly toting flags of the Confederacy--Baldwin's documentation of his own troubled times cuts to the core of where we find ourselves today.

Baldwin's thoughts move through an interconnected range of questions, from America's fixation on eternal youth, to its refusal to recognize the past, its addiction to consumerism, and the lovelessness that fuels it in its cities and popular culture. He recounts his own encounter with police in a scene disturbingly similar to those we see today documented with ever increasing immediacy. This edition also includes a new foreword from interdisciplinary scholar Imani Perry and an afterword from noted Baldwin scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Both explore and situate the essay within the broader context of Baldwin's work, the Movement for Black Lives, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the presidency of Donald Trump.

Nothing Personal is both a eulogy and a declaration of will. In bringing this work into the twenty-first century, readers new and old will take away fundamental and recurring truths about life in the US. It is both a call to action, and an appeal to love and to life.

A major collection of short fiction--including the story Sonny's Blues--by one of America's most important writers, exploring the wounds racism leaves in both its victims and its perpetrators.

In this modern classic, there's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it. The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water.

It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.

By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying, Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.

Including:
The Rockpile
The Outing
The Man Child
Previous Condition
Sonny's Blues
This Morning, This Evening, So Soon
Come Out the Wilderness
Going to Meet the Man

I am completely indebted to Jimmy Baldwin's prose. It liberated me as a writer.--Toni Morrison

This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin's 100th-year anniversary, probing the shortcomings of the American protest novel and the harmful representations of Black identity in film and fiction

Originally published in Notes of a Native Son, the essays Autobiographical Notes, Everybody's Protest Novel, Many Thousands Gone, and Carmen Jones: The Dark is Light Enough, showcase Baldwin's incisive voice as a social and literary critic.

Autobiographical Notes outlines Baldwin's journey as a Black writer and his hesitant transition from fiction to nonfiction. In the following essays, Baldwin explores the Black experience through the lens of popular media, critiquing the ways in which Black characters--in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Richard Wright's novel Native Son, and the 1950s film Carmen Jones--are reduced to digestible caricatures.

Everybody's Protest Novel: Essays is the first of 3 special editions in the James Baldwin centennial anniversary series. Through this collection, Baldwin examines the façade of progress present in the novels of Black oppression. These essays showcase Baldwin's profound ability to reveal the truth of the Black experience, exposing the failure of the protest novel, and the state of racial reckoning at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.

James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris. . . . He was a giant. -- Maya Angelou

This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin's 100th-year anniversary, delving into his years in France and Switzerland

Originally published in Notes of a Native Son, the essays, Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown, A Question of Identity, Equal in Paris, and Stranger in the Village will appeal to readers interested in Baldwin's observations as a Black man overseas.

During his transformative time in Europe, Baldwin uncovers what it means to be American, immersing the reader in his life as a foreigner, his troubling encounter with a Parisian prison, and his unprecedented arrival to a tiny Swiss village.

This final collection in the Baldwin centennial anniversary series raises issues of identity, belonging, nationhood, and race within a global context. Encounter on the Seine: Essays showcases Baldwin's strengths as a storyteller, revealing how his years in Paris transformed his understanding of American identity.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - In his final years, one of America's greatest writers envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project had never been published before acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined them to compose his Academy Award-nominated documentary.

Thrilling.... A portrait of one man's confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, 'devastated my universe.' --The New York Times

Peck weaves these texts together, brilliantly imagining the book that Baldwin never wrote with selected published and unpublished passages, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Peck's film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin's private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America.

This edition contains more than 40 black-and-white images from the film.

Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin's reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin's own experience, of a preacher's son coming of age in 1930's Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us. Giovanni's Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America's racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin's most ambitious novel. Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin's short fiction, including the masterful Sonny's Blues, the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

James Baldwin's final novel is the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers (The New York Times Book Review).

Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.

The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this stunning, unforgettable novel. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, James Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the forbidden passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.

From one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century--an extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies that powerfully speaks to contemporary conversations around racism.

It contains truth that cannot be denied. --The Atlantic Monthly

In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness and the later events that scored his heart with pain--the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his retum to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

First published in 1963, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time stabbed at the heart of America's so-called Negro problem. As remarkable for its masterful prose as for its frank and personal account of the black experience in the United States, it is considered one of the most passionate and influential explorations of 1960s race relations, weaving thematic threads of love, faith, and family into a candid assault on the hypocrisy of the land of the free.

Now, James Baldwin's rich, raw, and ever relevant prose is reprinted with more than 100 photographs from Steve Schapiro, who traveled the American South with Baldwin for Life magazine. The encounter thrust Schapiro into the thick of the movement, allowing for vital, often iconic, images both of civil rights leaders--including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Jerome Smith--and such landmark events as the March on Washington and the Selma march.

Rounding out the edition are Schapiro's stories from the field, captions by journalist Marcia Davis, and an essay by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, who was with her brother James in Sierra Leone when he started to work on the story. The result is a remarkable visual and textual record of one of the most important and enduring struggles of the American experience.

First published as a TASCHEN Collector's Edition, now available in a pocket-sized Centennial Edition.