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James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories

Go Tell It on the Mountain | Giovanni’s Room | Another Country | Going to Meet the Man (stories) More

Edited by Toni Morrison

“James Baldwin’s gift to our literary tradition is that rarest of treasures, a rhetoric of fiction and the essay that is, at once, Henry Jamesian and King Jamesian.” — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week “The Rockpile,” James Baldwin
August 2, 2024

News Forthcoming: Fall 2024
January 31, 2024

Video Reading James Baldwin Now: Darryl Pinckney on No Name in the Street
May 4, 2022

Buy all three Baldwin volumes in a boxed set and save $42.50.

“The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review, “found eloquent expression in [Baldwin’s] novels. His historical importance is indisputable.” 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.”

Toni Morrison, volume editor, was the author of numerous award–winning novels, including Love, Jazz, Song of Solomon, Sula, The Bluest Eye, and Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. From 1989 to 2006 she was Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories is kept in print by a gift from Frank A. Bennack Jr. to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week “The Rockpile,” James Baldwin
August 2, 2024

News Forthcoming: Fall 2024
January 31, 2024

Video Reading James Baldwin Now: Darryl Pinckney on No Name in the Street
May 4, 2022

Video Reading James Baldwin Now: Farah Jasmine Griffin on “Sonny’s Blues”
May 4, 2022

Video Reading James Baldwin Now: Eddie Glaude, Jr., on “The White Man’s Guilt”
May 4, 2022
Table of Contents

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Giovanni’s Room

Another Country

Going to Meet the Man
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

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ISBN: 978-1-88301151-2 970 pages

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N° 97 Library of America Series

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