On this page, you can sort and filter a list of Baldwin’s major works, including novels, essays, poems, plays, and more. Click on each title to learn more.
Looking for advice on where to start? The links below can help:
- Where to Start with James Baldwin from Eddie Glaude Jr. (African American Studies) for Penguin Random House UK
- Discovering Baldwin from the New York Public Library
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.
In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence, James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race.
In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.
His first major work, this novel is based in part on James Baldwin’s childhood in Harlem. With a potent combination of lyrical compassion and resonant rage, he portrays fourteen-year-old John Grimes, the stepson of a fire-breathing and abusive Pentecostal preacher in Harlem during the Depression.
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.
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…
Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America’s Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin’s nonfiction ever published.
The poems range from the extended dramatic narratives of “Staggerlee wonders” and “Gypsy” to the lyrical beauty of “Some days,” which has been set to music and interpreted by such acclaimed artists as Audra McDonald.
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…
Four-year-old TJ spends his days on his lively Harlem block playing with his best friends WT and Blinky and running errands for neighbors. As he comes of age as a “Little Man” with big dreams, TJ faces a world of grown-up adventures and realities.
Sol Stein documents the story of his intense creative partnership with Baldwin through newly uncovered letters, photos, inscriptions, and an illuminating memoir of the friendship that resulted in one of the classics of American literature. Included in this book are the two works they created together–the story “Dark Runner” and the play
In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness 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 return to the American South to confront a violent America…
Told with Baldwin’s characteristically unflinching honesty, this “splendid book” (The New York Times) offers illuminating, deeply felt essays along with personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.
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.”
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.
With spare, elegant, yet forceful dialogue and fresh, precise camera directions, Baldwin breathes cinematic life into this controversial and important figure, offering a new look at a man who changed himself in order to change the country.
At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable.
For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her Harlem congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when Margaret’s estranged husband, a scapegrace jazz musician, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path.
In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian…
Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also an appraisal of American racial politics. Offering a look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin considers such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and The…
One of America's most important writers takes on the arrest of Wayne Bertram Williams for the murder of twenty-eight black children in Atlanta to offer this searing indictment of the nation's racial stagnation.
Baldwin urges us to confront the oppressive institutions of race, religion, and nationhood itself, and insists that shared resilience among both Black and white people is the only way forward. As much as it is a reckoning with America’s racist past, The Fire Next Time is also a clarion call to care, courage, and love, and a candle to…
Baldwin’s stunning prose over and over proves relevant to our contemporary struggle for equality, justice, and social change.
For the first time in a collector’s boxed set, the definitive three-volume Library of America James Baldwin edition gathering all his essential writings, including the collected essays and complete fiction.
Here are the full texts of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Devil Finds Work, along with dozens of other pieces, ranging from a 1948 review of Raintree Country to a magnificent introduction to this book that, as so many of Mr. Baldwin's…