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Notes of a Native Son
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  • Published: 29 January 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141987279
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208
Categories:

Notes of a Native Son

Formats & editions
Paperback
29 Jan 2018
EBook
29 Jan 2018
Audiobook
4 Apr 2024
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A breakthrough work of social and cultural criticism from one of the foremost intellectuals of his era

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America - from life in Harlem, to the protest novel, movies, and the experience of African Americans abroad - and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic.

This book inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century and it is the book that established Baldwin's voice as a social critic. In an age of Black Lives Matter, Baldwin's essays are as powerful today as when they were first written.
  • Published: 29 January 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141987279
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208
Categories:

About the author

James Baldwin

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which evokes his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, was an immediate success. Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) has become a landmark of gay literature and Another Country (1962) caused a literary sensation. His searing essay collections Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) contain many of the works that made him an influential figure in the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin published several other collections of non-fiction, including The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972). His short stories are collected in Going to Meet the Man (1965). His later works include the novels Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979).

James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships: a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987 in France

portrait photo of James Baldwin

Also by James Baldwin

The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name ; No Name In The Street; The Devil Finds Work
I Am Not Your Negro
Encounter on the Seine
No Name in the Street
The James Baldwin Collection
The Harlem Ghetto
Everybody's Protest Novel
See all

Praise for Notes of a Native Son

Opens with a knock-out punch . . . the command of an audience and the rhetorical flourishes . . . are everywhere in his writing, but particularly in his essays, which contain a mix of registers from an intimate conversational tone to speechifying oratory

The Times

A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity that should influence for the better all who ponder on the things books say

Langston Hughes, The New York Times

A classic . . . Take the words out of the 1950s, when they were published, and they could apply to the women in pink hats, the scientists, the Black Lives Matter activists, the climate-change believers and the LGBTQ-rights supporters who have flooded the streets of Washington this year

Washington Post

Edgy and provocative . . . entertainingly satirical

Robert McCrum, Guardian

A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew

Washington Post

Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest

Time