The most recommended James Baldwin books

I am recommending this book because one can’t understand power without being beholden to it systemically and repeatedly, all the while dissecting power’s discontents. Baldwin’s words may seem to strike only to America’s core, but every marginalized person will find truth in them. As an Egyptologist, I rely on Baldwin to tell me what oppressed people in an authoritarian regime thought but could not commit to paper.

Sometimes I need a book that will inspire me not to continue writing, but to start; kinda like when I binge watch YouTube book talks—that’s the feeling this book brings over me—inspired. It’s a book that helps me write anything because I’m a person who struggles with—yet craves the ability to— strip a piece as bare as possible. Strip a story of its fluff and dissect its roots. I need to know what to save for later, and Gornick expressing the difference between situation and story is something I always go back to in order to help declutter my work. 

A vibrant Hughes is presented here much as he often appeared in life: raising a glass of gin to salute dear friends.

With a remarkable cast of characters that includes James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, these long-forgotten interviews and speeches of poet Langston Hughes bring us face-to-face with his extraordinary literary (and musical) contemporaries. 

Mischievous, controversial, and indefatigably affable, few literary figures ever combined such a diverse and rich inner spirit— all while writing some of the world’s most iconic poems.              

While Poirier’s book covers the same period as Sebba’s, the mood is completely different. Her focus is on artists, with a cast that reads as your ultimate dinner-party guest wishlist: Juliette Gréco, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Miles Davis... Such creators couldn’t help but salvage something from their war experiences, create a new world on their own terms. Poirier knows that history is made of people. And Paris is a rich source, for it’s a city that has attracted a multitude of movers and shakers for centuries. Poirier shows how such creators can produce much more than art, or a movement—they can mould an entire period. Poirier also knows that this personal telling of history makes reading it more enjoyable; her plotting is on point, her sprinkle of gossipy anecdotes just-so.

This novel may be my favorite book of the 1970s and a woefully underappreciated deep satire not just of its moment, but of ours as well. I think about the mere fact of museums being renamed "centers of art detention" once a day or so, and I haven't reread the book in a decade.

This past summer, I was stunned to discover the blistering and unapologetic Blues for Mister Charlie by James Baldwin.

The play revolves around mounting racial tensions in a small Southern town in the late 1950s after a white shopkeeper is accused of murdering a young, black college student, evoking the real-life murder of Emmett Till. However, Baldwin paints a nuanced picture by balancing the lives of the accused perpetrator alongside the victim, Richard, a troubled addict, prone to inciting violence.

Of course, this incendiary story feels as relevant today as during the civil rights era when it was written. What astonished me most was learning that this beautiful, difficult work has rarely been staged on Broadway. Baldwin's exploration of racism, violence, and justice deserves to be experienced by modern audiences.

Master teacher David Mura’s A Stranger's Journey addresses long-overlooked issues of race and identity in publishing and in the standard teaching of creative writing and he brilliantly advocates for a more inclusive and expansive definition of writing craft. Though this book is partly aimed at educators, he offers incredibly useful craft lessons as well, primarily through his deft analysis of work done by writers ranging from James Baldwin to Mary Karr to ZZ Packer. In a world that no longer accepts the notion that our greatest authors have to be “dead white men,” Mura offers a necessary window into the intersection of race, literature, and culture.

I’ve long been interested in the African-American authors of the mid-20th century—James Baldwin and Chester Himes are particular favorites—but until the past year, I’d never gotten around to the masterful John A. Williams.

!Click Song tells the story, in fluid, sensuous prose, of a black writer whose career begins just after World War II, and while he does enjoy some success, he is hampered, demeaned, and diminished in the New York publishing world of the time because of his race.

This book is about the terrible hidden costs and pains of racism among seemingly successful people. The fact that the protagonist’s career resembles Williams’s own only adds to the power and poignancy of this beautiful, unheralded gem of a novel.

A key work in the last part of Baldwin's life, as he was reassessing everything after the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and others in 1965-68. The reader can sense the aching effort Baldwin makes to retain hope and his sense of the worth of engagement with a world that so often rejected the essential him. Letting us, as his readers, into that doubt and pain and torment was an act of great honesty and, at bottom, love. Very few people could use the English language as powerfully as Baldwin (and he could do it in both spoken and written word, which puts him in a smaller group still). This book is a reminder of that power, too.

I discovered this compilation of many well- and lesser-known interviews when I began working on Baldwin in the year 2000. I love it as it gives us the writer in his own words, tracing his artistic development and views on his craft, exile, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as US politics, culture, and national identity. We follow Baldwin’s journey from 1961, with the famous Studs Terkel interview introducing “the young Negro writer,” to the “Last Interview” with Quincy Troupe, conducted in 1987, just days before Baldwin’s death in his beloved house in southern France. In between, we get a kaleidoscope of moments from his life and career and fascinating insights into his literary imaginary and humanistic philosophy.