American History Tellers - Fan Favorite: Great American Authors | James Baldwin: The Exile | 5

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Born into poverty in Harlem in 1924, James Baldwin rose to become a celebrated novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, and a leading voice in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. In his debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and in his essay collections, Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote eloquently and provocatively about race, religion, sexuality, politics and class. To distance himself from the racial hatred and discrimination at home, Baldwin spent much of his adult life in France, helping to create a vibrant community for other Black artists, such as Nina Simone, Miles Davis and Josephine Baker. But he returned to America often to provide a fearless and incisive testimony to the events that defined his tumultuous era.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Imagine it's a Friday night in March of 1943. You're outside a restaurant called the American Diner in Trent in New Jersey, trying to catch up to a friend who's walking quickly ahead of you on the sidewalk. Your friend Jimmy is a young black man from Harlem who works laying railroad tracks for the U.S. Army. Tonight was supposed to be a break from hard work. Together you watched a movie and headed to the diner to grab a bite to eat. But the man at the counter refused to serve Jimmy because he's black. And you could see the anger and frustration in Jimmy.

his face when he was turned away. You know that look, and now you're worried. You pick up your pace, trying to catch up to him. He's still glaring back at the diner from the street. Hey, Jimmy, wait up. Hey, come on. I thought this was the American diner. Doesn't seem very American to me. Hey, keep your voice down. You want them to call the police? Your friend weaves down the crowded sidewalk and stops and waits for you. All I wanted was a hamburger and a coffee. Is that a crime? I'm sorry. It's a... It's not fair. It's totally wrong. You reach to pat him on the back, but he flinches, he pulls away.

I'm so sick of hearing those words. We don't serve colors. We don't serve Negroes. We don't serve your kind. Not everyone is like that, not in New York at least. Maybe you should come to Greenwich Village. We never have these problems there. I would if I could. But my mother needs the money I make here. My stepfather's sick, and I've got seven siblings counting on me, remember? I thought New Jersey would be better, but it might as well be the south. Jimmy storms off again, and you follow.

He stops in front of a fancy restaurant where inside the tables are all covered with white tablecloths and the customers are all white like you. Your friend reaches for the door. No, no, Jimmy, don't. Don't even try it. You know what'll happen. I don't care. Let them try and kick me out.

I'll show them. Why even set foot in this place when you know they don't want to be. you because tonight, I'm not going to just walk away. As he pulls the door open, you realize you've never seen him so angry. It's like he's in a trance. No, Jimmy, stop. You watch as he walked into the restaurant and seats himself at an empty table. A flustered waitress approaches him.

You know what she's going to tell him, but you're worried what he'll do when he hears those words again. You're listening, ad-free on Audible. Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of American History Tellers ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American History Tellers, Our History, Your Story. Born into poverty in Harlem, 1944, James Baldwin rose to become a celebrated novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, as well as a leading voice in the American Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin, the stepson of a stern preacher, initially aspired to be a novelist and would publish six beloved works of fiction in his lifetime, including his autobiographical debut, Go Tell It on the Mountain. But he was equally known for his passionate, intensely personal essays on racial issues in America, which were collected in two of his best-known books, notes of a native son, and the fire next time.

Baldwin moved to France after World War II to escape the bigotry he faced at home, but he returned to the state's office. often to write first-hand accounts on the turmoil in the South in the 1960s. A former youth preacher, he became a sought-after lecturer, whose voice-inspired activists with eloquent and passionate reflections on race, religion, sexuality, politics, and class. His outspoken critiques of U.S. leaders and policies also caught the attention of the FBI, whose agents spied on him for years. This is Episode 5 in our six-part series on Great American Authors, The Exile.

James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2nd, 1924. His 21-year-old mother, Emma Bertus Jones, had moved to New York from Deal Island, Maryland. In 1927, when James was three, she married David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher from New Orleans, who was decades older. James wouldn't learn until he was a teenager that David Baldwin was not his biological father. James, who went by Jimmy, helped raise and care for the eight younger siblings his mother and stepfather would go on to have together. All of the Baldwin children feared their angry and violent father, whom James later described as the most bitter man I've ever met, and indescribably cruel. Reverend David Baldwin's parents had been enslaved in Louisiana. But James' stepfather never talked about his past.

In fact, for a man who preached for a living, he said very little to his stepson. James called him father, but the two were not close and often fought. But James adored his mother, who went by Bertus. As the eldest, he became her helper and protect her. With so many children in the house, there was rarely enough food to go around. The Baldwin's often relied on welfare assistance to get by. Many of their neighbors were poor, too, but the neighborhood was dynamic and filled with a mix of black families, many with southern roots, as well as immigrants from the Caribbean and Europe. But soon after Baldwin entered public school in 1999, the Great Depression began, and racial and economic tension spread through the city, as did crime and unemployment. The Reverend Baldwin's anger at

his circumstances often spilled over into his job as a clergyman and occasional laborer. He was fired from jobs and his sporadic income forced the family to move to different apartments around Harlem. James found solace in books and libraries, and his teachers nurtured the frail, shy, and precocious boy. One of the most influential educators was Gertrude Elise Eyre, the first black principal in New York City, who later became a writer and activist. In 1935, when James enrolled at her school, Ayr saw something special in him and encouraged his interest in books and theater. A white female teacher named Orilla Miller, known as Bill, was also impressed by Baldwin's curiosity and intellect. She gave him books and plays to read and took him to movies and museums.

She also bought the family food and clothes. Baldwin's father was wary of Miller and warned his son not to trust white people, but Baldwin would later say that because of the kindness of Bill Miller, I never really managed to hate white people. At Frederick Douglas Jr. High, Baldwin found another mentor in one of his teachers, the black poet and playwright County Cullen, a minister's son who had been part of the Harlem Renaissance art scene of the 1920s. Cullen invited Baldwin to join the school's literary club. And with Cullen's coaching, Baldwin won a short-story writing contest and wrote a song that earned a letter of praise from Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia. But Baldwin's stepfather David

complained about his interest in books. He also criticized James's white friends, classmates, and teachers, and his complaints only increased when in 1938, James was accepted into the mostly white, all-boys-Dowit Clinton High School in the Bronx. At Clinton, Baldwin became an editor on the school magazine, The Magpie, where he published poems, essays, stories, plays, and interviews. He became friends with white classmates who shared with Baldwin more literature, politics, history, and religion. Around this time, Baldwin also began preaching as part of a youth ministry program at a friend's church, Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, where he discovered a talent for public speaking. But by his final year of high school, Baldwin had begun to turn away from the church.

Even his stepfather became aware of this shift, and in a rare conversation between the two, he one day asked, you'd rather write than preach, wouldn't you? James said yes. When he graduated high school in 1941, Baldwin wrote in his yearbook, that his ambition was to become a novelist playwright. But first, he needed to earn money. After high school, Baldwin worked a series of low-wage jobs to provide for his family. By 1942, his stepfather had grown sick

and begun showing signs of mental illness, but his mother was pregnant with her ninth child. So Baldwin moved to New Jersey to take a job laying railroad tracks for the U.S. Army. One night in Trenton, accompanied by a white friend, Baldwin tried to get a meal at a nice restaurant, but was told that they did. didn't serve black people. In anger, he threw a waterglass, shattering a mirror. He and his friend

ran off as the proprietor tried to grab Baldwin. He began to feel, as he later put it, the weight of white people in the world. But Baldwin found a refuge in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where he took the train some weekends from his job in New Jersey. There in the village, he wrote in cafes and played guitar at night. He felt more at ease among the bohemian artists, poets and musicians there. Because back home, conditions in his family were deteriorating. Over the years, Baldwin and his siblings had sensed that their father's anger and bitterness masks some sort of mental illness that had lately grown worse. For a while, David Baldwin refused to eat and accused his family of trying to poison him. One night, he walked off, and Baldwin

found him at a subway station, confused and lost. In 1943, Baldwin's stepfather was committed to a mental institution, where doctors discovered he was also suffering from tuberculosis. In June of that year, Baldwin quit his job in New Jersey and returned home. His stepfather died of tuberculosis on July 29th. The same day, his mother gave birth to her ninth child. David Baldwin's funeral was held on August 2nd, James's 19th birthday. That night he celebrated with friends, drinking whiskey in Greenwich Village, while chaos spread through Harlem. The previous day a black soldier had been shot and wounded by a white police officer at the Hotel Braddock in Harlem. The incident triggered a riot, and Mayor LaGuardia

sent in more than 6,000 police officers, sparking more unrest. Police then killed six black residents, and 200 more were injured. The next day, Baldwin and his mother and siblings drove to the graveyard for his stepmother's burial through what he described as a wilderness of smash plate glass. The spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. After his stepfather's death, Baldwin continued to work a series of unsatisfying jobs at a meatpacking factory, in the garment district, as a dishwasher, an elevator boy, but he kept getting fired. He was depressed and realized that to achieve his dream of becoming a writer, he needed to escape Harlem. Imagine it's late October, 1933. You're a 42-year-old black artist living in Manhattan's

Greenwich Village. You have been part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, but you've come to prefer the downtown bohemian lifestyle of the village, where your friends, white and black, include fellow artists, writers, and poets. Today, you're at your apartment on Green Street, playing records with your friend, a skinny 19-year-old named Jimmy. You call him The Kid. You were introduced two years earlier, and you become something of a mentor to the inspiring young writer. He lives up in Harlem, but he's been coming down here to the village to work various odd jobs. He clearly loves it here. He watches as you drop the needle on another record. we listening to next. Ella Fitzgerald. No, this is Maraney. The Blues, kid. This one's called

Bad Luck Blues. Hmm, sounds like my song. She's so good, voice like moonshine. I heard her sing once at the vanguard before she moved back south. Harlem feels like the South to me sometimes. Just a couple of months ago, that cop shot a black soldier. And what did the city do? Sent in more cops who killed more people. The kid lights a cigarette and walks over to warm his hands on your pot belly stove. I'm making some progress on my novel, but it's so hard to write in that crowded apartment. My brothers and sisters are in my business all day. It's like I told you before, you have to get out of there.

If you want to be an artist, be a little selfish. Do what's right for you. If you're 19, it's your life now. Easier said than done. I don't have a place to stay. It won't be easy. But who wants easy? If you want to make art, you have to take risks.

He drifts through your small apartment looking at paintings, your portrait of Louis Armstrong, the framed article from Life magazine about you and other black artists. You've been coaching him on how to look at art, how to see the world as an artist, and how to hone his independence. I know, I know. I want to make a living for my writing,

just like you found a way to do it with your painting. But I can't do that if I stay in Harlem. What's holding you back? I want to be there for my mother. But if I stay in Harlem, I'll die. You've come to care for Jimmy, and you feel he needs a helping hand and a nudge. You could stay here with me for a while,

until you get settled. And I'm sure Connie would hire you to wait tables at the Calypso. She adores you, kid. Are you sure? I don't think this apartment is big enough for two. Then again, you're always telling me to take more chances, and, as you say, just walk through the unusual door. You're happy to hear him considering your advice.

Everyone who meets the kid sees something special in him. You've read the first pages of the novel he's writing, and they're beautiful. You want to help him pursue his dreams, but you're not one to push too hard. The decision has to be his. In the fall of 1943, months after his stepfather's death and the Harlem riot, Baldwin decided to leave home and move to Greenwich Village. He was encouraged by an influential mentor and role model, the talented African-American painter Buford Delaney.

A few years earlier, Baldwin had been introduced to Delaney through a high school friend. Though 20 years apart in age, he and Delaney had a lot in common. Delaney's father had also been a minister, and like Baldwin's grandparents, Delaney's mother had been born into slavery. Baldwin often visited Delaney after work to talk about music, art, literature, poetry, and politics. And when Baldwin left home, he lived with Delaney. who helped him find work waiting tables at the Calypso restaurant, a well-known hangout for an eclectic mix of writers, actors, and musicians that included Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Paul Robson,

an earthy kit. And around this time, Baldwin started to explore his sexuality. Ever since high school, he'd been aware of his attraction to men. In the village, he had a series of short-term affairs with both women and men. He'd later describe his late teenage years as a bewildering and frightening period. He came to consider himself homosexual, a term he preferred to gay, but later in life would say that neither term could quite cover whatever it was I was beginning to feel. He declared, I loved a few people, and they loved me. It had nothing to do with these labels. Of course, the world has all kinds of words for us, but that's the world's problem. I have nothing to prove. The world also belongs to me. Baldwin's first love was an African-American man, Eugene Worth,

who later killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Baldwin also fell for the actor Marlon Brando, whom he met while taking a theater class. Baldwin called him a beautiful cat. The two became close friends, but never lovers. At night, after working at the Calypso and drinking with friends, Baldwin worked on his first novel. The book was an attempt to capture the entangled and complicated strands of his own life story, race, sexuality, religion, and especially his relationship with his stepfather. He called the novel, Crying Holy, and would sometimes stay up after work, writing until dawn, the start of a habit that would continue throughout his career. In 1945, Baldwin was introduced to Richard Wright,

who had achieved fame and notoriety for his novel, Native Son. After a night of drinking bourbon together, Wright agreed to read some of Baldwin's work. Baldwin sent 60 pages of his novel, which he now called In My Father's House. Wright thought the novel showed promise and sent the pages to his editor, who helped Baldwin secure a $500 fellowship for young writers. But the money didn't last, and the editor's publishing house passed on the novel. Over the next two years, Baldwin turned his efforts to magazines, and finally began getting paid for his work. In the pages of the new leader and the nation, he found his voice writing essays and book reviews.

In early 1948, he received another fellowship and decided to use the money to buy a one-way ticket to Paris. He wanted to distance himself from the racism he faced. in America and surround himself with other writers. He didn't tell his family until weeks before his flight that he was leaving the United States, possibly forever. Then he arrived in Paris with just $40 in his pocket. He finally felt free and optimistic, but soon he would face the same financial, professional, and emotional challenges he thought he had left behind. Hello, I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. And we're the hosts of British Scandal.

Now, Britain loves a royal scandal. Abdication. affairs, dodgy uncles, we've had the lot. But this series is about two brothers. Raised in palaces bound by tragedy, supposed to be inseparable. So how did they end up barely speaking? Was it jealousy, the press, the firm? Or was this royal rift always inevitable? This is the story of Harry and Wills and the scandal that split the House of Windsor.

Follow British scandal wherever you get your podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Audible. I'm Indravama and in the latest season. season of the spy who, we open the file on Larry Chin, the spy who outplayed Nixon. For decades, Chin was embedded deep inside U.S. intelligence. Then comes an opportunity. Richard Nixon's secret plan to reopen relations with China, information Chin can place directly into Mao's hands. But the CIA has a weapon of their own, a Chinese mole ready to defect, how long until Chin's gig is up. Follow the spy who now wherever you listen to podcasts. James Baldwin's move to Paris

in 1948 was partly inspired by his mentor and benefactor Richard Wright, who had also moved to Paris two years earlier. Wright's groundbreaking 1940 novel Native Sun had a tremendous impact on the literary world and black writers of the day, including Baldwin. In Paris, Wright helped his protege find a place to live and introduced him to a social circle of fellow expatriates. The atmosphere in post-war Paris was lively and progressive, and Baldwin found a community full of artists and intellectuals, similar to the bohemian lifestyle he'd left in Greenwich Village. He took to wearing a beret and began visiting hashish cafes and gay bars.

Though he still experienced and witnessed discrimination, and still struggled with feelings of depression and loneliness, Baldwin felt liberated from the daily prejudices he faced back home. As he'd later write, In America, the color of my skin stood between myself and me. In Europe, that barrier was down. But Baldwin was still an impoverished writer, struggling to survive. To make ends meet, he continued to write essays and book reviews for magazines

back in the States. For a while, he worked as a nightclub singer, and later as a lawyer's clerk. Then in the spring of 1949, Baldwin caused a stir in literary circles with a controversial magazine essay in which he criticized the so-called protest novel. Baldwin took aim at Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery work Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had been one of his favorite books as a child, but which he now considered self-righteous and sentimental. He also took a swipe at Richard Wright's native son, accusing it of perpetrating stereotypes of both blacks and whites. Baldwin felt that Wright's character of Bigger Thomas,

a rapist and murderer, was a bleak caricature of a black criminal. He advocated for a more nuanced treatment of black characters. Some readers were shocked by Baldwin's assault on his mentor, and Wright was hurt and angry. The two would remain friends, but the relationship was forever. strained, especially after Baldwin later wrote two more essays that continued to dissect

and critique Native Sun. Meanwhile, Baldwin continued working on a book of his own, the autobiographical novel he had begun writing in the States. By now he had changed the title to go tell it on the mountain, but finding a publisher proved to be a challenge, in part because publishers were wary of his explicit treatment of race and religion. Baldwin finally completed the book in 1952 after working on it for 10 years. He mailed the manuscript to the publisher Alfred A. Knaf in New York, which expressed interest but first wanted to meet the author in person. Baldwin borrowed money from his friend Marlon Brando, who was passing through Paris so he could sail home and meet with his editor. Back in New York, Baldwin reconnected with family and friends while making revisions to the book,

which would be published a year later. Baldwin secured a thousand-dollar advance and returned to Paris. drawing deeply on his own childhood, Go Tell It on the Mountain is the story of a 14-year-old boy and his violent stepfather, a Pentecostal preacher in Harlem. The novel introduced deeply personal themes that Baldwin would explore throughout his career, race and racism, identity and sexuality, faith and mortality. He described it as the book I had to write if I was ever to write anything else.

Go Tell It on the Mountain received favorable reviews, and Baldwin won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship that evening. year. He remained in Paris, where throughout the mid-1950s, Baldwin befriended a wider network of black expats, including the poet Maya Angelou and the singer Nina Simone. His friend Beaufort Delaney moved to Paris from New York in 1953 as well. Paris was now Baldwin's home, but he continued to return to the United States often. In 1954, he spent time at two writers' colonies in New England, where he worked on a new novel, Giovanni's Room, as well as a collection of essays that would be published in late 1955 under the title Notes of a Native Son,

a non to the book he criticized and strained a friendship over. The essay collection received some strong reviews, but initially didn't sell well. Sales would increase sharply, though, a year later, with the publication of his controversial second novel. When Baldwin first sent the manuscript of Giovanni's room to his editors at Knav, they declined to publish it, warning Baldwin that the story of a white expat in Paris, struggling with his sexuality, would ruin his career. but Baldwin was determined to see it in print.

Giovanni's room was inspired by Baldwin's love affair with a Swiss man named Lucien Habersberger, who Baldwin met in late 1949 when Habersberger was 17. The affair ended in 1952 when Habersberger married a woman and started a family. But the two remained close. Baldwin even dedicated the novel to Lucien. After being rejected by Knoff, in early 1956, Baldwin found a publisher in London willing to publish Giovanni's room in the UK. Dial Press then agreed to publish it in the U.S.

The book came out later that year and sold well. The New York Times praised Baldwin for treating a sensitive subject with dignity and intensity. Despite his achievements, over the years, Baldwin had wrestled with episodes of despair and thoughts of suicide. During his early days in Paris, he once tried to hang himself with a bed sheet in his hotel room, but the water pipe broke and he survived. In the summer of 1956, after a fight with his lover, he again attempted suicide, swallowing a handful of pills. He immediately regretted it and called a friend who helped him regurgitate the medication. Beyond his own personal struggles, Baldwin was also deeply troubled by the news of racial violence back in America.

Incidents such as the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 and the bombing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s home in early 1956 left Baldwin nursing a sense of guilt. over the relative comfort of his life in Paris. So in the summer of 1957, he returned to the U.S. to write about the rising civil rights movement and to finally visit the American South. To learn more about white supremacy and segregated schools, he met with preachers, students, and civil rights organizers in Charlotte, Montgomery, Little Rock, and Nashville. In Atlanta, he interviewed Martin Luther King and heard him preach at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Baldwin's stories about the South would appear in Harper's magazine,

and the partisan review, and later be included in an essay collection, nobody knows my name. Though then Baldwin returned to Europe to work on his third novel, another country, the escalation of the civil rights movement drew him back to the states again in 1960. Baldwin had an urgent feeling that he needed to play a part. He wrote to his brother, David, and said, I can't fool myself any longer. He agreed to return to the American South to write a profile of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for Harper's Magazine.

Imagine it's May 21, 1960. You're a well-known writer based in France. You've just flown from Paris to Atlanta to Tallahassee, Florida. And tomorrow, you're scheduled to give a lecture at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, a mostly black school where students were recently tear-gast and arrested by police during a protest march. Tonight, the campus reneged on its offer to let you stay at the university guesthouse, so you've come to a rooming house on the outskirts of town. It's after midnight, and you're trying to get some writing done.

It's also a hot night, so you keep the door ajar. That's when you hear footsteps in the hall and a knock on your door. A young man you had met briefly earlier stands in the doorway. Hello, young man. Is my typing bothering you? No, not at all. I was just, could I borrow a pencil? He looks to be about 19 or 20 and reminds you of your younger brothers.

You get the sense he doesn't really need a pencil, and maybe he just wanted to talk with someone. Of course. Come in, come in. Let's see. Here, one. May I ask what you needed for? I'm studying for an exam. I broke my pencil and I can't find my sharpener. Are you a student over at the university? Yes, sir. I'm on a scholarship there, hoping to become a bacteriologist. I'm actually scheduled to visit your campus tomorrow to speak to students about what happened a few weeks back. Were you there that day? I was on campus, and I knew about the march, but I decided not to join them. I knew my parents wouldn't approve, and I didn't want to get kicked out of school.

I guess you could say I wasn't ready for action. I feel bad about it now since all those kids got arrested. Sounds like you wanted to join the march. I'm not really sure. Mainly I'm here to study, but I kind of regret not joining it. It's such a strange time. I want to do the right thing, but I'm not sure what that is. Well, it seems to me like you were raised right.

You just have to do what feels right to you. If you want to study, study. If you want to march, then march. I guess so. But it troubles me to feel like a bystander. You take a moment to size up this studious young man, as he fiddles with the pencil you've loaned him. He clearly wants you to tell him what he should do,

but you've never believed much in giving out that kind of advice. There's more than one way to show courage. Look, the world can be a difficult and dangerous place for people like us, especially here in the South. Someday, we all have to stand up to those dangers, but it's up to us to choose how. The young man ponderes this, and nods and walks back to his room. You try to get back to your writing, but you can't stop thinking about young people like your visitor.

Some of them just trying to study for exams, others protesting in the streets, but all of them, in their own ways, fighting for equality and justice. When Baldwin returned to the United States in 1960, his first stop in Tallahassee reminded him that race relations were as bad as ever. In an essay called They Can't Turn Back, Baldwin wrote about the black student activists at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University as the only people, in this country now, who really believe in freedom. Baldwin continued on to Atlanta to interview Martin Luther King Jr. And into the early 1960s, Baldwin more often and intentionally wrote about the civil rights movement and its leaders. He also began to lecture widely. Drawing on his experience as a youth minister in Harlem, he became a dynamic and sought-after speaker on college campuses. And then in 1963, he traveled throughout the South on a lecture tour. As he did, he developed his own

take on the civil rights movement, one that differed from the radical messaging of Malcolm X and the nonviolent protests of Martin Luther King. Baldwin's message was that for whites and blacks to live in harmony, they had to treat the experience like a marriage, which takes work. As he told one audience of students, love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up. In May of 1963, Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine, which said, there is not another writer who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South. A week later, Baldwin was invited to New York to meet with President John F. Kennedy's brother, Robert, who was then Attorney General and wanted to better understand racism in America.

Then in July of 1963, Baldwin published one of his most powerful and enduring books, The Fire Next Time. The book contained two lengthy magazine essays he'd written months earlier, one of them framed as a letter to his 14-year-old nephew. Baldwin described in plain and direct language the brutal system of oppression that trapped black boys like his nephew into cycles of violence and despair. But he also suggested a radical response to that cycle, urging his nephew to believe that by loving the very people who fought to oppress him, he and his generation could make America what America must become.

He also encouraged white Americans to confront their role in racial violence and to love themselves and each other. The fire next time became a bestseller and elevated Baldwin to a new level of international acclaim. But soon after its publication, a horrific period of racial violence and assassinations would test Baldwin's resolve. As James Baldwin's public profile grew,

he began to draw more criticism and unwanted attention. That included the critical eye of the American government. For many years, FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover had tracked the activities of authors and actors he considered a threat to the country. Baldwin had been on Hoover's radar since the early 1960s. According to one of the first documents in Baldwin's FBI file, Hoover's men believe Baldwin was connected with several Communist Party front groups. He wasn't, but it didn't help that Baldwin often criticized the FBI and Hoover personally.

Baldwin once mentioned that he was working on a book about the FBI's role in the racial turbulence of the South, telling the New York Times, I blame Jayegger Hoover in part for events in Alabama. Negroes have no cause to have faith in the FBI. Eventually, Baldwin's FBI file would grow to nearly 2,000 pages collected from 1960 until the early 1970s. Hoover himself scribbled a menacing note on one 1964 document. Isn't Baldwin a well-known pervert? Though he came to suspect that his movements were being tracked,

Baldwin traveled and lectured extensively through the mid-1960s, spending time in Istanbul, London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, researching and writing various projects, including essays, plays, novels, and screenplays. And in 1965, he famously debated the conservative commentator William F. Buckley on television, declaring the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro. The 60s had been a tumultuous time for Baldwin and the nation. advances like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were offset by the assassinations of Malcolm X in the same year and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King three years later in 1968. These assassinations nearly broke Baldwin, who in 1970 returned to France, settling in the village of Saint-Paul-Devance.

There he continued to write about the civil rights struggle in a 1972 essay collection, no name in the street, and the 1974 novel, if they were. Beale Street could talk. Beale Street was mainly a love story, set in Harlem in the 1970s, but also featured the arrest of a black man for a crime he did not commit. Baldwin's house in Saint-Paul-DeVance became a hub for black writers, artists, dancers, actors, and musicians, as well as friends and family. Baldwin's brother David came to live with him, as did Beaufort Delaney, Baldwin's painter friend from the early days in Greenwich Village. Delaney had been displaying signs of dementia, but seemed comfortable at Baldwin's home. setting up his easel in the garden most days and painting colorful portraits of his longtime friend.

Harry Belafonte and Sidney Portier were regular house guests, as were musicians Nina Simone, Josephine Baker, Miles Davis, and Ray Charles. Baldwin and Simone, also an expatriate to France, drank and dance late into the night. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Baldwin welcomed younger black writers to his home too, becoming a mentor and inspiration to Maya Angelou, Tony Morrison and Alex Haley. Throughout it all, Baldwin continued to visit the United States to teach, give lectures, and write articles on the New South. But he always eagerly returned to his home at Saint-Pol,

which was both a refuge and the scene of some domestic turmoil. Baldwin had relationships with several different men, falling in and out of love. He stayed in touch over the years with his former lover Lucian, who was now back in his life. But at this time, Baldwin was drinking too much and experiencing episodes of depression, which had troubled him for decades. Following the death of his friend Buford Delaney in 1979,

these episodes only grew worse. By the early 1980s, one friend accused Baldwin of having lost the fire. He'd said he'd become a man who likes to talk a lot and drink a lot, but who hates to write. Then, soon after his 60th birthday in 1983, Baldwin developed a nagging sore throat. He tried to treat the problem with straight whiskey. but his illness persisted. Imagine it's March 25th, 1986,

at the home of your famous brother in the south of France. You've been visiting him off and on for years, but lately he seems to need you around more than ever. Now, well past midnight, you're hurrying to your brother Jimmy's room after his assistant woke you up. Jimmy's having another one of his episodes, as you've taken to calling them,

and you're hoping you can calm him down. You arrive at his room, find him even more drunk and distraught than usual, You trip over an empty bottle as he rushed to his side. Jimmy, I thought the doctor said no more whiskey. Here, let me help you up. Whiskey, that's the only thing that makes my throat feel better. Well, you just broke the bottle, so that's the end of that.

Let's just get you undressed and into bed. You need to be rested for tomorrow's procedure. Jimmy has cancer of the esophagus, and he's scheduled to have surgery tomorrow. But he's resisted going under the knife every step of the day. the way. Now he swats away your hand as you try to unbutton his shirt. I don't want that damn procedure. That doctor doesn't know what he's talking about if he thinks the sore throat is going to bring me down. Cancer? Please. Jimmy, you're sick. I just wish you had agreed to see the doctor sooner when all this first started. You kept refusing and now look at you. I know I'm sick,

damn it. But, brother, I have no intention of dying. Nobody said anything about dying. least get you in the bed. There's no point in trying to get him undressed when he's like this. Instead, you help your brother to his feet and then roll him to his bed. He starts mumbling to himself as you tuck a quilt around his frail body. You don't understand. I'm just so lonely. What's that, Jimmy? I said you don't understand. No one understands. None of us knows anything. You've seen your brother's dark moods before, but he seems especially distraught to not. He finally. It's okay, Jimmy.

I'm here. I'll always be here. He finally starts to drift off to sleep, and you quietly close the door. You've helped your brother weather the ups and downs of recent years, and you've become closer than ever, more friends than brothers, really. Lately, though, he seems so fragile and sad. You can't imagine life without him, but if the doctors are right, even if tomorrow's surgery is a success, he might not have that long to live.

live. Over the years, James Baldwin's younger brother David had become his confidant, manager, and caretaker. In the late 1970s, he began visiting his brother often at the home he called Shea Baldwin. In 1979, Baldwin had published his final novel, just above my head. It had been inspired by a dream his brother had while visiting him in France. It tells the story of a group of friends back in Harlem, a story about church, religion, music, family, and homophobia. Through the early 1980s, Baldwin remained as prolific as ever, and published a collection of poetry called Jimmy's Blues

and an essay collection, Evidence of Things Not Seen, which he dedicated to his brother David. He also still traveled often to the States to teach and run a writer's workshop at the five colleges in Western Massachusetts. And over the years, he had become more and more open about his sexuality. But though he wrote about homosexuality in his fiction, Baldwin considered his own sex life a private and deeply personal matter and largely avoided publicly discussing the details of his personal relationships.

He also enjoyed some recognition as a leading man of letters. In 1986, President Francois Mitterrand awarded Baldwin France's highest honor, La Ligion Donnaire. And later that year, Baldwin visited Russia with a group of other writers and met with Mikhail Gorbachev to discuss world peace. But by April of 1987, the cancer in his esophagus had spread to his liver. Confined to bed, Baldwin continued to receive friends and lovers, joking about how he longed for a drink and a cigarette.

And then on December 1st of that year, 1987, as he was surrounded by friends and holding his brother David's hand, James Baldwin died. He was 63. It's all right, Jimmy, his brother said, as he kissed his head. You can cross over now. A week later, thousands attended Baldwin's funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. In her eulogy, Tony Morris accredited Baldwin for inspiring her writing. She said, I relied on your fierce courage to tame wilderness for me.

At the time of his death, Baldwin had been writing a memoir, Remember This House, a collection of his personal recollections of civil rights leaders, Megra Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. But after his death, publisher McGraw-Hill sued his estate to recover the $200,000 advance they had paid him. The lawsuit was dropped by 1990, and the manuscript later became the basis for Raoul Peck's 2016 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, which introduced Baldwin to a new generation of readers. Baldwin's writing chronicled the harsh cruelties of racial injustice and the quest for freedom with wit and candor. He relentlessly preached the transformative power of love,

approaching his own flaws and the ones of those close to him with honesty and hope for a brighter future. He declared, I won't live to see it, but I do believe in it. I think we're going to be better than we are. From Wondery, this is the fifth episode of Great American Authors for American History Tellers. On our next episode, in July 1960, Harper Lee published to Kill a Mockingbird, quickly becoming a household name. But she was soon overwhelmed by the public attention generated by her book and retreated to solitude, leaving the world to wonder whether she would ever publish again.

If you'd like to learn more about James Baldwin, we recommend James Baldwin, a biography by David Leaming, and Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for our own by Eddie S. Glaw Jr. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsay Graham for airship, audio editing by Christian Paraga, sound design by Molly Bach, music by Lindsay Graham, voice acting by Ace Anderson. This episode is written by Neil Thompson, edited by Dorian Marina, produced by Alita Rosansky. Our production coordinator is Desi Blaylon, managing producer Matt Gant, senior producer Andy Herman, and executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondering. Follow American History Tellers on the Audible app, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen

to all episodes of American History Tellers ad-free by joining Audible. And to find out more about me and my other projects, including my live stage show coming to a theater near you, go to not that Lindsaygram.com. That's not that Lindsaygram.com.