‘His true genius lies in the universality of his observations’: Reflections on James Baldwin’s legacy

A prolific writer and civil rights activist, James Baldwin remains one of literature's most iconic trailblazers due to his contributions to the LGBTQ+ canon and writing about the African American experience, making his mark on the cultural and literary landscape of the 20th Century.

Born in Harlem, New York on 2nd August, 1924, Baldwin was raised in a religious household which led him to take on the role of preacher at his local Pentecostal church during his teenage years – a chapter in his life that heavily shaped his critically acclaimed debut novel Go Tell it on the Mountain.

At the age of 24, still facing the unrelenting injustices of anti-Black racism in American society, he fled to post-war Paris in search of greater racial tolerance and sexual liberation. Moving between France and his home country over the years informed both his fiction and non-fiction writing – from the European backdrop of the tragic, tender queer love story in his second novel Giovanni's Room, to the global lens through which his essays examined themes such as race, identity, and the universal struggle against oppression and injustice.

Despite his death at the relatively young age of 63 in 1987, Baldwin's large body of work, which includes poetry, essays, novels and short stories, continues to inspire new generations of readers and writers.

To mark 100 years since the author's birth, we asked writers, academics, and editors to share their thoughts on how Baldwin's life and work have influenced their own, and why his literary, cultural, and political legacy has endured.

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Josephine Greywoode, Publishing Director at Baldwin publisher Penguin Press

Baldwin’s writing has enjoyed a staggering renaissance in the UK over the past ten years and it’s exciting to celebrate the centenary of his birth at a time when the breadth of his work resonates more profoundly than ever. Historically, Go Tell It on the Mountain was read most widely, then as attitudes to queer literature changed, Giovanni’s Room became the most popular novel. More recently, readers have rediscovered The Fire Next Time, his powerful essay on race in America.

There's something utterly unique and timeless about Baldwin’s non-fiction in particular. The way he unfurls an argument with intellectual rigour and personal anecdotes, drawing out essential human truths as he builds to a memorable and profound conclusion. While many of his essays focus on the struggle for racial justice in America, he lived in France for many years and offers startling reflections on his experiences in Europe as well.

With so much variety in his rich body of work, different books speak to different moments, whether personal or political. I think this is central to Baldwin’s enduring appeal as writer: a single novel doesn't give a full picture of his genius and there’s always more to discover.

Dr. Lesley Nelson-Addy, Education Manager at British race equality and civil rights think tank The Runnymede Trust:

James Baldwin’s literature ought to be studied, because of his fearless representation of the experiences of Black people in what he terms this ‘White world'. He also illustrates elements of African American culture, both in celebration and with tones of challenge. He writes about faith, family, and homosexuality.

The most profound and complex feature of Baldwin’s writing, that is also reflected in his life experience, is his considerations of the nuances of varying attitudes towards Black people across Europe in comparison to America. We have the privilege of accessing his strong body of literary fiction and non-fiction works, as well as a number of video recordings of his speeches and discussions about race and about humanity – ideas that remain pertinent in our world today.

He was an activist, he was a philosopher. He was powerful and he and his thoughts are still relevant today. There are moments in Giovanni’s Room that are described so artfully and vividly – images I still recall. Read his work. Read it all. Don’t be afraid of the way his work bites – the discomfort is necessary for change.

Regina Porter, playwright and author of The Travelers and The Rich People Have Gone Away:

My favourite James Baldwin novel is Another Country. I love this 1962 messy masterpiece so much that I named a character in my debut novel, The Travelers, after the novel’s main character, Rufus Scott. Baldwin brings New York City to full blown, brazen life page after page in Another Country. You can see, smell, taste, touch and hear the music, beauty, ugliness, joy and contradictions of a metropolis that has something for everyone but, sadly, not enough to sustain us all. I only learned this year that Baldwin began working on Another Country in 1948. What inspires me most about Baldwin is his ability to capture human duality. His understanding of the cost of love and hatred, the latter, a weed that when pulled up in one spot often takes root in another. We can toss them, eat them or use them as fertiliser. Baldwin challenges us to take stock of the weeds in our gardens before they destroy our ability to live in harmony on this planet.

William Rayfet Hunter, winner of the 2023 #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize and author of Sunstruck:

I first read Giovanni’s Room on a family beach holiday. I read it surreptitiously, slipped inside the cover of another, less conspicuous book. The sumptuous and tender depiction of queer love, guilt and self-acceptance rocked the closeted teenage me to my core. Baldwin’s writing is urgent and frank. His words slap you in the face with their unavoidable truth. His novels reflect a deeper and wider politic that ran through Baldwin’s life. A fierce and outspoken queer and civil rights activist, Baldwin used his work and his public appearances to shine an unflinching light on the injustice that saturated American and Western society. His true genius lies in the universality of his observations on love, sex, identity and belonging. The most accessible place to start is, as I did, with the beautiful and affecting Giovanni’s Room. His collection of autobiographical essays, Notes of a Native Son, is still essential today.

Extract from Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own by Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University:

My engagement with Jimmy over these many years has been, in part, an arduous journey of self-discovery. Reading and teaching his words forced me back onto myself, and I had to return to my wounds: to understand the overbearing and vexed presence of my father in my head. […] Jimmy’s essays demanded a kind of honesty with yourself, without sentimentality, before you could pass judgment on the world as it is. Lies, he maintained, gave birth to more lies. He insisted that we see the connection between the disaster of our interior lives and the mess of a country that believed, for some odd reason, that if you were white you mattered more than others. What we made of ourselves in our most private moments, we made of the country. The two were inextricably related, because the country itself reflected those intimate terrors that moved us about.

[… Baldwin] sought to wrap his mind around the complex bundle of evasions, denials, loves, and hatreds that made up the American project, and point a pathway forward to becoming new, different human beings.