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The Fire Next Time
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  • Published: 4 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9781802067200
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $32.00
Categories:

The Fire Next Time

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 July 2025
EBook
25 Jan 1990
Audiobook
4 Apr 2024
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90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

'We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation'

James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.

'Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle ... all presented in searing, brilliant prose' The New York Times Book Review

'Baldwin writes with great passion ... it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy' Sunday Times
  • Published: 4 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9781802067200
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $32.00
Categories:

About the author

James Baldwin

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were bestsellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.
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
Dark Days
Giovanni's Room
I Am Not Your Negro
La próxima vez el fuego
Encounter on the Seine
No Name in the Street
See all

Praise for The Fire Next Time

His prophetic warning . . . Baldwin’s words can still bring clarity to our conversations about injustice today

Guardian

Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle . . . all presented in searing, brilliant prose

The New York Times Book Review

Baldwin writes with great passion ... it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy

Sunday Times

The great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement ... his seminal work

Guardian

Riveting . . . part of Baldwin's enduring power is that he was not a political thinker. He was interested in the soul's dark spaces much more than in the body politic.

Colm Toibin, Telegraph

A true prophet . . . his thought and its utterance are nothing less than majestical

Mario Puzo, The New York Times