On James Baldwin

Colm T?ib?n’s personal account of encountering James Baldwin’s work, published in Baldwin’s centenary year.

Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm T?ib?n first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university and was struggling to free himself from a religious upbringing. He had even considered entering a seminary and was searching for literature that would offer illumination and insight. Inspired by the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, T?ib?n found a writer who would be a lifelong companion and exemplar.

From On James Baldwin

Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his White novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. “All art,” he wrote, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”

On James Baldwin is a magnificent contemporary author’s tribute to one of his most consequential literary progenitors.

Author: Colm Toibin
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Published: 08/02/2024
Series: The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities at Brandeis University
Pages: 168
ISBN: 9781684582471
Language: English