James Baldwin Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952)
  2. Giovanni’s Room (1956)
  3. Another Country (1962)
  4. The Fire Next Time (1963)
  5. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968)
  6. If Beale Street Could Talk (1974)
  7. Little Man, Little Man (1976)
  8. Just Above My Head (1978)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Sonny’s Blues (1957)
  2. Going to Meet the Man (1965)
  3. Jimmy’s Blues (1968)
  4. James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories (1998)
  5. Fifty Famous People (2003)
  6. Vintage Baldwin (2004)

Plays In Publication Order

  1. The Amen Corner (1954)
  2. Blues for Mister Charlie (1961)
  3. One Day When I Was Lost (1969)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Notes of a Native Son (1955)
  2. Nobody Knows My Name (1961)
  3. Nothing Personal (1964)
  4. Black Anti Semitism And Jewish Racism (1969)
  5. Harlem, U.S.A. (1971)
  6. A Rap on Race (1971)
  7. No Name in the Street (1972)
  8. A Dialogue (1973)
  9. The Devil Finds Work (1976)
  10. The Price of the Ticket (1985)
  11. The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985)
  12. Baldwin: Collected Essays (1998)
  13. Native Sons (2004)
  14. The Cross of Redemption (2011)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

James Baldwin Books Overview

Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin’s stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the attitudes of two generations of an embattles family, Go Tell It on the Mountain is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society confronting inevitable change. ‘The most important novel written about the American Negro,’ says Commentary. ‘It is written with poetic intensity and great narrative skill,’ writes Harper’s. Saturday Review praises it as ‘masterful,’ and the San Francisco Chronicle declares that this important American novel is ‘brutal, objective and compassionate.’

Giovanni’s Room

Baldwin’s haunting and controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two. Examining the mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight.

Another Country

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions sexual, racial, political, artistic that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting 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 set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the early 1970s.

The Fire Next Time

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two ‘letters,’ written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as ‘sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…
all presented in searing, brilliant prose,’ The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

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 between Leo’s childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo’s loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war. Overpowering in its vitality, extravagant in the intensity of its feeling, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is a major work of American literature.

If Beale Street Could Talk

In this honest and stunning novel, James Baldwin has given America a moving story of love in the face of injustice. 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 uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

Little Man, Little Man

Depicts the environment and daily life of two boys coming of age in Harlem.

Just Above My Head

The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni’s Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.

Sonny’s Blues

Impassioned tales of human experience that reach the soul.

Going to Meet the Man

‘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, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the hero*in that a down and out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob. By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying and informed throughout by Baldwin’s uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

Jimmy’s Blues

Finally in paperback, here is James Baldwin’s only collection of poems. Baldwin’s language is deceptively simple this poetry is easily understood. But the emotions behind the words go to the core not only of the poet’s soul, but of America’s. Readers will see Baldwin here in both a familiar and an altogether different light.

James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories

With burning passion, the authority of experience, and a sharp, epigrammatic wit, these essays articulate issues of race, democracy, and American identity. This edition the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin’s nonfiction ever published presents the complete texts of the landmark collections ‘Notes of a Native Son’ 1955 and ‘Nobody Knows My Name’ 1961; ‘The Fire Next Time’ 1963, a classic analysis of America’s racial divide; ‘No Name in the Street’ 1972; and ‘The Devil Finds Work’ 1976; and 36 more essays, including nine never before collected.

Fifty Famous People

A companion volume to ‘Fifty Famous Stories Retold’ by James Baldwin, ‘Fifty Famous People‘ introduces children to a variety of men who performed their parts in the great drama of the world’s history. Included are anecdotes about great American statesmen, such as Lincoln and Franklin, as well as kings of long ago Cyrus the Great, King Alfred, and Robert Bruce, boys who became famous as poets Longfellow and Caedmon, and others who excelled in the art of painting Giotto and Benjamin West. Other stories depict orators, scholars, inventors, slaves, and soldiers. Regardless of their fields of endeavour, all the characters portrayed show qualities that make them worthy of being remembered and looked up to as models of behavior. Young children will enjoy hearing these stories read to them, while older ones will take pleasure in reading them to themselves.

Vintage Baldwin

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions. One of the few genuinely indispensable writers. The Saturday ReviewIn his internationally acclaimed novels, short stories, plays and essays, James Baldwin was and remains a powerfully prophetic voice in the American literary landscape, fearlessly brooding upon issues such as race, sex, politics, and art. His literary achievement is a lasting legacy about what it means to be American. Vintage Baldwin includes the short story Sonny’s Blues ; the galvanizing civil rights examination My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation ; the essays Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem, The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American, and Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South ; and excerpts from the novel Another Country and the play The Amen Corner.

The Amen Corner

Only a boy preacher who had grown up to become one of America’s most eminent writers could have produced a play like The Amen Corner. For to his first work for the theater James Baldwin brought all the fervor and majestic rhetoric of the storefront churches of his childhood along with an unwavering awareness of the price those churches exacted from their worshipers.

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.

The Amen Corner is a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons. It is a scalding, uplifting, sorrowful and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater.

Blues for Mister Charlie

In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence which is loosely based on the notorious 1955 killing of Emmett Till James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race. For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a ‘boy’ like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast. In his award winning play, Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well intentioned whites are implicated and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.

One Day When I Was Lost

Based on Alex Haley’s bestselling classic The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a rare, lucidly composed screenplay from one of America s great masters of letters. Son of a Baptist minister; New York City hustler; honor student; convicted criminal; powerful minister in the Nation of Islam; father and husband: Malcolm X transformed himself, time and again, in order to become one of the most feared, loved, and undeniably charismatic leaders of twentieth century America. No one better represents the tumultuous times of his generation, and there is no one better to capture him and his milieu than James Baldwin. 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.

Notes of a Native Son

Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin’s first nonfiction book has become a classic. These searing essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and Americans abroad remain as powerful today as when they were written. ‘He named for me the things you feel but couldn’t utter…
. Jimmy’s essays articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time.’ Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Nobody Knows My Name

‘These essays…
live and grow in the mind’ James Campbell, ‘Independent’. Baldwin’s early essays have been described as ‘an unequaled meditation on what it means to be black in America’. This rich and stimulating collection contains ‘Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem’, polemical pieces on the tragedies inflicted by racial segregation and a poignant account of his first journey to ‘the Old Country’, the Southern states. Yet equally compelling are his ‘Notes for a Hypothetical Novel’ and personal reflections on being American, on other major artists Ingmar Bergman and Andre Gide, Norman Mailer and Richard Wright and on the first great conference of African Writers and Artists in Paris.

A Rap on Race

In 1970, America’s most celebrated Black author and the world’s most acclaimed anthropologist met for a seven and a half hour conversation about race and society. The transcript of their discussion is a revealing and unique book filled with candor, passion, rage, and brilliance. ‘Blunt, peppery, and spontaneous…
.’ The Atlantic.

No Name in the Street

This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies displays James Baldwin’s fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness, 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 retum to the American South to confront a violent America face to face.

The Devil Finds Work

James Baldwin At The Movies…
Provocative, timeless, brilliant. Bette Davis’s eyes, Joan Crawford’s bit*chy elegance, Stepin Fetchit’s stereotype, Sidney Poitier’s superhuman black man…
These are the movie stars and the qualities that influenced James Baldwin…
and now become part of his incisive look at racism in American movies. Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist, offering us a vision of America’s self delusions and deceptions. Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness. And here, too, is the stunning prose of a writer whose passion never diminished his struggle for equality, justice, and social change. From The Birth of a Nation to The Exorcist one of America’s most important writers turns his critical eye to American film.

The Price of the Ticket

The works of James Baldwin constitute one of the major contributions to American literature in the twentieth century, and nowhere is this more evident than in The Price of the Ticket, a compendium of nearly fifty years of Baldwin’s powerful nonfiction writing. With truth and insight, these personal, prophetic works speak to the heart of the experience of race and identity in the United States. 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 works do, combines his intensely private experience with the deepest examination of social interaction between the races. In a way, The Price of the Ticket is an intellectual history of the twentieth century American experience; in another, it is autobiography of the highest order.

The Evidence of Things Not Seen

This edition of a classic work by one of America’s premier writers offers a new Foreword by Derrick Bell with Janet Dewart Bell to the 1995 paperback edition, and is as meaningful today as it was when it was first published in 1985. In his searing and moving essay, James Baldwin explores the Atlanta child murders that took place over a period of 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. Rummaging through the ruins of American race relations, Baldwin addresses all the hard to face issues that have brought us a moment in history where it is terrifying to to be a black child in white America, and where, too often, public officials fail to ask real questions about justice for all. Baldwin takes a time specific event and makes it timeless: The Evidence of Things Not Seen offers an incisive look at race in America through a lens at once disturbing and profoundly revealing.

Baldwin: Collected Essays

‘Collected Essays’ is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin’s nonfiction ever published. The collection confirms his as a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. Included are such famous essays as ‘The Harlem Ghetto’, ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, Many Thousands Gone’, and ‘Stranger in the Village’ .

Native Sons

James Baldwin was beginning to be recognized as the most brilliant black writer of his generation when his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, established his reputation in 1955. No one was more pleased by the book’s reception than Baldwin s high school friend Sol Stein. A rising New York editor, novelist, and playwright, Stein had suggested that Baldwin do the book and coaxed his old friend through the long and sometimes agonizing process of putting the volume together and seeing it into print. Now, in this fascinating new book, 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 Equal in Paris, both published here for the first time. Though a world of difference separated them Baldwin was black and gay, living in self imposed exile in Europe; Stein was Jewish and married, with a growing family to support the two men shared the same fundamental passion. Nothing mattered more to either of them than telling and writing the truth, which was not always welcome. As Stein wrote Baldwin in a long, heartfelt letter, You are the only friend with whom I feel comfortable about all three: heart, head, and writing. In this extraordinary book, Stein unfolds how that shared passion played out in the months surrounding the creation and publication of Baldwin s Notes of a Native Son, in which Baldwin s main themes are illuminated.A literary event published to honor the eightieth anniversary of James Baldwin s birth, Native Sons is a celebration of one of the most fruitful and influential friendships in American letters. From the Hardcover edition.

The Cross of Redemption

The Cross of Redemption is a revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form. James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. 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 literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society. Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, If van Gogh was our nineteenth century artist saint, Baldwin was our twentieth century one.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment