James Baldwin

Born

1924-08-02

Died

1987-12-01

Birthplace

Harlem, New York, USA

Biography

James Arthur Baldwin was an African-American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son, explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions.