Please join us in celebrating the life and work of James Baldwin, who was born in New York on this day in 1924. He would have been 90 years old today! James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, and educated in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews and immediately was recognized as establishing a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else, he remarked. Baldwins play The Amen Corner was first performed at Howard University in 1955 (it was staged commercially in the 1960s), and his acclaimed collection of essays Notes of a Native Son, was published the same year. A second collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, was published in 1961 between his novels Giovannis Room (1956) and Another Country (1961).
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 13:30:00 +0000