48 Fun Facts About James Baldwin

In which New York neighbourhood was James Baldwin born?

Harlem: in 'Notes of a Native Son' he recalls burying his stepfather amid the wreckage of the 1943 Harlem riot.

In 1970 Baldwin wrote an open letter to which jailed activist, calling her his sister?

Angela Davis: she was jailed on charges tied to a deadly 1970 courtroom takeover, and a jury later acquitted her of all charges.

What was the occupation of Baldwin's stepfather, David Baldwin?

Baptist preacher: James, the eldest child, took wartime defense work in New Jersey to help support the family.

Which celebrated poet taught Baldwin French at Frederick Douglass Junior High?

Countee Cullen: a prize-winning star in his twenties, he saw his reputation as a poet wane by about 1930 and taught in New York schools from 1934 until his death.

Which future photographer worked with Baldwin on the De Witt Clinton school magazine?

Richard Avedon: the two classmates reunited for Nothing Personal, a 1964 book pairing Avedon's photographs with Baldwin's text.

As a teenager, James Baldwin preached in which kind of church?

Pentecostal: he began preaching at 14, and those years inspired both his first novel and his play The Amen Corner.

Which modernist painter became Baldwin's mentor and showed him a Black man could live by art?

Beauford Delaney: after he moved to France, his painting turned abstract, and Baldwin wrote admiringly of his friend's art.

Which established novelist helped Baldwin win a writing grant, then became the target of his criticism?

Richard Wright: Baldwin's attacks caused a rift between them, which Baldwin later revisited in the essay 'Alas, Poor Richard'.

Baldwin's 1985 book-length essay examined a wave of child murders in which city?

Atlanta: Baldwin doubted the verdict against Wayne Williams, the man convicted of two of the killings.

In Baldwin's novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, what is Leo Proudhammer's profession?

Actor: the novel opens with Leo collapsing from a heart attack on stage, then looks back on his childhood and his beloved brother Caleb.

In Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin takes on which Southern novelist's views on desegregation?

William Faulkner: Baldwin was rebutting Faulkner's 1956 advice that civil rights campaigners slow down their push for desegregation.

Baldwin's jailing over a stolen bedsheet became which essay?

Equal in Paris: when the case was dismissed, the courtroom laughed at the story of the sheet, and Baldwin wrote that their merriment chilled him.

The title If Beale Street Could Talk refers to a famous blues street in which city?

Memphis: though the title names Memphis's famous blues street, Baldwin set the novel in New York City.

Baldwin's essay 'Stranger in the Village' grew out of stays in which country?

Switzerland: he went to a small Alpine village there to finish his first novel, and the villagers' fascination with a Black stranger became his lens on American racism.

What was Baldwin's first novel, published in 1953?

Go Tell It on the Mountain: the semi-autobiographical novel draws on his fraught relationship with his stepfather.

Which US agency kept a file of more than 1,800 pages on Baldwin?

The FBI: director J. Edgar Hoover even looked into banning Baldwin's novel Another Country as obscene.

Who is the teenage protagonist of Baldwin's 1953 debut novel?

John Grimes: the story unfolds on his 14th birthday and ends with him seized by a religious conversion on the floor of a storefront church.

In a 1979 essay, Baldwin argued that what is a language in its own right?

Black English: Baldwin said Black Americans could not stop speaking it without suppressing the history that had formed it.

In which essay did Baldwin attack Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Everybody's Protest Novel: Baldwin argued that such books fail to show Black characters as full human beings, and he turned the same charge on his mentor's novel.

Which fellow novelist did Baldwin sharply portray in a 1961 Esquire essay?

Norman Mailer: the two had become friends, yet Baldwin used the essay to pick apart Mailer's famous celebration of 'hip' rebels modelled on Black life.

What fate awaits Giovanni at the end of Giovanni's Room?

He is guillotined: David tells the whole story from a house in the south of France on the night before, racked with guilt for having abandoned him.

In Giovanni's Room, Baldwin's main characters are all what?

White: Knopf, which had published his first novel, turned it down, and Dial Press brought it out instead.

Baldwin's play The Amen Corner centres on which preacher?

Sister Margaret: she fights to keep her position as her church's pastor just as her estranged husband comes home to die.

In Baldwin's story 'Sonny's Blues', which instrument does Sonny play?

Piano: his older brother, a high school algebra teacher, finally hears him play in a Greenwich Village club and begins to understand him.

Baldwin completed Another Country during a stay in which city?

Istanbul: he returned to the city often, and during a year in Turkey he directed a production of the prison drama Fortune and Men's Eyes.

Which character's downfall opens Another Country?

Rufus Scott, a jazz drummer: after he jumps from the George Washington Bridge, the rest of the novel follows the friends and lovers left trying to understand why.

The Fire Next Time recounts dining with which Muslim leader?

Elijah Muhammad: he hoped to win Baldwin over to the Nation of Islam and its call for a separate Black nation, but Baldwin rejected it.

The first essay of The Fire Next Time is addressed to Baldwin's nephew on what anniversary?

The centenary of Emancipation: Baldwin urged the boy to turn his anger at America's cruelty into a clear-eyed love that could change it.

Which magazine first ran 'Letter from a Region in My Mind', the long essay of The Fire Next Time?

The New Yorker: in it Baldwin describes how, the summer he turned 14, fear of the evil around him drove him into the church.

The title The Fire Next Time comes from a couplet in what kind of song?

An African-American spiritual: its couplet contrasts the Flood with the fire to come, drawing on the rainbow God showed Noah in Genesis.

Baldwin appeared on the cover of which magazine in 1963?

Time: its cover story found him on a speaking tour, travelling from city to city to talk about civil rights.

Baldwin's 1964 play Blues for Mister Charlie is loosely based on which murder?

Emmett Till: as with Till's real killers, the store owner who murders the play's young hero is acquitted.

Baldwin's famous 1965 debate with William F. Buckley took place at which institution?

Cambridge Union: weeks later The New York Times Magazine printed Baldwin's speech as 'The American Dream and the American Negro'.

In a 1977 open letter to President Carter, Baldwin took up the case of which jailed group?

The Wilmington Ten: Baldwin argued that their case echoed the tactics once used against integration advocates in the early civil rights years.

In March 1965 Baldwin joined marchers walking 50 miles from which Alabama town to Montgomery?

Selma: he had earlier gone there to watch Black residents stand in long lines to register to vote as armed deputies looked on.

Which novelist friend put Baldwin up for months in his Connecticut studio?

William Styron: years later, when many Black critics attacked Styron's novel about Nat Turner, Baldwin publicly stood by him.

Besides King's, which friend's assassination does Baldwin's No Name in the Street reflect on?

Malcolm X: Baldwin had also tried to write a screenplay of Malcolm's life, and in 1972 he published his work on it as a book.

Which village in the south of France became Baldwin's home until his death?

Saint-Paul-de-Vence: he hosted leading musicians and other artists at his house there.

Baldwin's 1976 book-length essay The Devil Finds Work is a critique of what?

American movies: it grew from his boyhood trips to the films with a young schoolteacher, Bill Miller, into an attack on how Hollywood portrayed Black Americans.

If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) follows Tish and which jailed young sculptor?

Fonny: he is locked up on a false rape charge, and Tish, pregnant with his child, and both their families fight to get him free.

Who directed the 2018 film of If Beale Street Could Talk?

He had written the screenplay in 2013, before Moonlight made him famous.

Who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for If Beale Street Could Talk?

Regina King: she plays Tish's mother Sharon, who travels to Puerto Rico to plead with the woman whose accusation jailed her daughter's fiancé.

Who directed the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro?

Raoul Peck: he built it from Remember This House, the book about three murdered friends that Baldwin never finished.

Who narrates I Am Not Your Negro?

Samuel L. Jackson: before his acting career he was a civil rights activist, and he served as an usher at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral.

Which honour did the French government give Baldwin in 1986?

Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur: yet at home he never won a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize.

Baldwin died in December 1987 of which illness?

He was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York.

Which Nobel laureate in literature wrote 'Life in His Language', a tribute to Baldwin after his death?

Toni Morrison: she thanked him for giving her 'a language to dwell in' and credited him with showing her what writing could truly do.

From 1983 to 1986 Baldwin taught at which Massachusetts institution?

Hampshire College: he taught there while commuting back and forth between the United States and his home in the south of France.