Portrayals of James Baldwin and others in his circle highlight the iconic writer’s activism

The American writer and activist James Baldwin (1924–87) considered himself a “witness” as he challenged perspectives on America and its history through his work. He was often recognized for speaking out against injustice when other like-minded artists, collaborators and organizers were overshadowed or silenced. By bringing together artworks that feature James Baldwin alongside portraits of other key figures who had an impact on his life, This Morning, This Evening, So Soon situates Baldwin among a pantheon of culture bearers who were instrumental in shaping his life and legacy, particularly in relationship to his advocacy for gay rights. The book accompanies an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, curated by the National Portrait Gallery's Director of Curatorial Affairs, Rhea L. Combs, in consultation with Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hilton Als. Well-known portraits by Beauford Delaney and Bernard Gotfryd are shown alongside paintings, photographs and films representing key figures in Baldwin’s circle. By viewing Baldwin in this context of community, readers will come to understand how Baldwin’s sexuality and faith, artistic curiosities and notions of masculinity―coupled with his involvement in the civil rights movement―helped shape his writing and long-lasting legacy.
The book relies on portraiture to explore the interwoven lives of Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry (writer and activist), Barbara Jordan (lawyer, educator and politician), Bayard Rustin (leader in social movements), Lyle Ashton Harris (artist), Essex Hemphill (poet and activist), Marlon Riggs (filmmaker, poet and activist) and Nina Simone (singer-songwriter, pianist and activist), among others.
Artists include: Richard Avedon, Glenn Ligon, Donald Moffett, Beauford Delaney, Bernard Gotfryd, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson, Jack Whitten.

Celebrating the Centenary of James Baldwin's birth, a box set of Baldwin's principal novels, featuring Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk.

These deluxe editions feature new introductions by Roxane Gay, Kevin Young, and Brit Bennett.

Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood. With lyrical precision 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.

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. One of the first novels to openly explore the theme of homosexuality, it paved the way for generations of gay and lesbian novelists.

And If Beale Street Could Talk is a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime --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.

This stunningly designed slipcase with art by Baldwin's friend and contemporary Beauford Delaney will make the perfect perennial gift and keepsake.

A deluxe hardcover edition of one of James Baldwin’s most admired works, exploring what it means to be Black in America and his own search for identity

Part of the Beacon Classics series

Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin's timeless and moving essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad inaugurated him as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the 20th century. Through a mix of autobiographical and analytical essays, Baldwin delivers honest and raw revelations about what it means to be Black in America, specifically pre-Civil Rights Movement, and how, he himself, came to understand the nation.

Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin 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.” He was 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.

For fans of Baldwin's well-known works or those new to Baldwin altogether, this celebrated essay collection showcases his extraordinary writing, revolutionary analyses, and prophetic insight into American culture and politics.

Baldwin’s life and legacy as remembered by a pantheon of artists and writers: from Jamaica Kincaid and Barry Jenkins to Richard Avedon and Alice Neel

When author James Baldwin died in 1987, he left behind an extraordinary body of work: novels, poems, film scripts and, perhaps most indelibly, essays. A friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, Baldwin was a critical voice in the civil rights movement. After reaching acclaim in his early career as a writer, he struggled to retain the author’s “I,” while taking on the “we” of the people.
Edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hilton Als and growing out of his landmark exhibition at David Zwirner in 2019, God Made My Face brings together an impressive assembly of contributors, ranging from Baldwin biographer David Leeming to novelist Jamaica Kincaid and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, to create a memorial mosaic: one that not only mirrors Baldwin’s various tones but also closely examines his singular contributions to cinema, theater, the essay and Black American critical studies. These essays are illustrated by artwork from modern and contemporary artists who were either personal contemporaries of Baldwin or directly inspired by his work. In each piece assembled here, the authors speak from a personal, informed perspective, illuminating Baldwin’s deeply anguished and enlightened voice and his belief that, ultimately—because we are human—we share the potential to love, connect and live together in all our glory.
Artists include: Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Richard Avedon, Don Bachardy, Alvin Baltrop, Anthony Barboza, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, George McCalman, Alice Neel, Elle Pérez, Cameron Rowland, Kara Walker, James Welling, Larry Wolhandler.
Authors include:Stephen Best, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, Darryl Pinckney.

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A New York Times Notable Book

Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects: his mother, a self-described "Negress," who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author's own social and intellectual formation.

Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.

Toni Morrison's definitive edition of James Baldwin's incomparable nonfiction.

Contains all the major essays collections in their entirety, plus 36 uncollected essays.

James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not Your Negro." Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America's Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction ever published.

With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, Baldwin fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as "The Harlem Ghetto," "Everybody's Protest Novel," "Many Thousands Gone," and "Stranger in the Village." Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political.

The classic The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of America's racial divide and an impassioned call to "end the racial nightmare...and change the history of the world." The later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era and include his remarkable works of film criticism. A further 36 essays—nine of them previously uncollected—include some of Baldwin's earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.

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.

The Evidence of Things Not Seen, award-winning author James Baldwin’s searing 1985 indictment of the nation’s racial stagnation, is contextualized anew by an introduction from New York Times bestselling author and political leader Stacey Abrams.

In this essential work, James Baldwin examines the Atlanta child murders that took place over twenty-two months in 1979 and 1980. Examining this incident with a reporter’s skill and an essayist’s insight, he notes the significance of Atlanta as the site of these brutal killings—a city that claimed to be “too busy to hate”—and the permeation of race throughout the case: the Black administration in Atlanta; the murdered Black children; and Wayne Williams, the Black man tried for the crimes. In Baldwin’s hands, this specific set of events has transcended its era and remains as relevant today as ever.

Rummaging through the ruins of American race relations, Baldwin addresses all the hard-to-face issues that have brought us to a moment in history when we are forced to reckon with some of the country’s most ingrained, foundational issues and when, too often, public officials fail to ask real questions about “justice for all.” In this, his last book, Baldwin also reveals his optimistic faith in America’s ability to move toward repair: “This is the only nation in the world that can hope to liberate—to begin to liberate—mankind from the strangling idea of the national identity and the tyranny of the territorial dispute. I know this sounds remote, now, and that I will not live to see anything resembling this hope come to pass. Yet, I know that I have seen it—in fire and blood and anguish, true, but I have seen it. I speak with the authority of the issue of the slave born in the country once believed to be: the last best hope of earth.”

Includes If Beale Street Could Talk, now a major motion picture directed by Barry Jenkins.

The Library of America completes its edition of the collected fiction of the literary voice of the Civil Rights era with this volume gathering three revealing later works of the 1960s and ’70s.

With such landmark novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and the essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin established himself as the indispensable voice of the Civil Rights era, a figure whose prophetic exploration of the racial and sexual fissures in American society raised the consciousness of American readers. But by the late 1960s and ’70s many regarded Baldwin as being out of sync with the political and social currents transforming America: too integrationist for Black Arts Movement writers and others on the Left, yet too “pessimistic” for many white readers, and as a result his later novels have never received the consideration given his earlier fiction. Sober in outlook but ambitious in scope, these works show Baldwin responding with his signature passion—for music, for justice, for life—and searching intelligence to the new realities of a rapidly changing cultural landscape, as the Movement era gives way to the age of identity politics that we still live in today. This culminating volume in the Library of America edition of his fiction illustrates how Baldwin continues to be relevant in twenty-first-century America, especially in his dramatizing of the unequal treatment of black men by the police and the justice system, his nuanced depictions of the black family, and his explorations of sexuality.

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.