James Baldwin
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48 free James Baldwin trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
James Baldwin was a teenage preacher in Harlem, a dishwasher in Greenwich Village, an expatriate in Paris with forty dollars to his name, and by 1963 the face on the cover of Time magazine explaining America to itself. He wrote novels that put gay and bisexual men at the centre of serious fiction and essays still quoted in every argument about race. These 48 questions follow the life and the books. The stepfather and the church, Countee Cullen as a junior-high teacher, Richard Avedon on the school magazine, Beauford Delaney and Richard Wright, the Rosenwald grant that paid for the flight to Paris, the stolen bedsheets that got him jailed, and the Swiss village that became Stranger in the Village. Then the work: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni's Room and its guillotined bartender, Another Country finished in Istanbul, The Fire Next Time and its letter to a nephew, Blues for Mister Charlie, Sonny's Blues, If Beale Street Could Talk and the films that followed, I Am Not Your Negro and Regina King's Oscar. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which New York neighbourhood was James Baldwin born?
Harlem
Harlem: in 'Notes of a Native Son' he recalls burying his stepfather amid the wreckage of the 1943 Harlem riot.
Q 02In 1970 Baldwin wrote an open letter to which jailed activist, calling her his sister?
Angela Davis
Angela Davis: she was jailed on charges tied to a deadly 1970 courtroom takeover, and a jury later acquitted her of all charges.
Q 03What was the occupation of Baldwin's stepfather, David Baldwin?
Baptist preacher
Baptist preacher: James, the eldest child, took wartime defense work in New Jersey to help support the family.
Q 04Which celebrated poet taught Baldwin French at Frederick Douglass Junior High?
Countee Cullen
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.
Q 05Which future photographer worked with Baldwin on the De Witt Clinton school magazine?
Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon: the two classmates reunited for Nothing Personal, a 1964 book pairing Avedon's photographs with Baldwin's text.
Q 06As a teenager, James Baldwin preached in which kind of church?
Pentecostal
Pentecostal: he began preaching at 14, and those years inspired both his first novel and his play The Amen Corner.
Q 07Which modernist painter became Baldwin's mentor and showed him a Black man could live by art?
Beauford Delaney
Beauford Delaney: after he moved to France, his painting turned abstract, and Baldwin wrote admiringly of his friend's art.
Q 08Which established novelist helped Baldwin win a writing grant, then became the target of his criticism?
Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Baldwin's attacks caused a rift between them, which Baldwin later revisited in the essay 'Alas, Poor Richard'.
Q 09Baldwin's 1985 book-length essay examined a wave of child murders in which city?
Atlanta
Atlanta: Baldwin doubted the verdict against Wayne Williams, the man convicted of two of the killings.
Q 10In Baldwin's novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, what is Leo Proudhammer's profession?
Actor
Actor: the novel opens with Leo collapsing from a heart attack on stage, then looks back on his childhood and his beloved brother Caleb.
Q 11In Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin takes on which Southern novelist's views on desegregation?
William Faulkner
William Faulkner: Baldwin was rebutting Faulkner's 1956 advice that civil rights campaigners slow down their push for desegregation.
Q 12Baldwin's jailing over a stolen bedsheet became which essay?
Equal in Paris
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.
Q 13The title If Beale Street Could Talk refers to a famous blues street in which city?
Memphis
Memphis: though the title names Memphis's famous blues street, Baldwin set the novel in New York City.
Q 21What fate awaits Giovanni at the end of Giovanni's Room?
He is guillotined
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.
Q 22In Giovanni's Room, Baldwin's main characters are all what?
White
White: Knopf, which had published his first novel, turned it down, and Dial Press brought it out instead.
Q 23Baldwin's play The Amen Corner centres on which preacher?
Sister Margaret
Sister Margaret: she fights to keep her position as her church's pastor just as her estranged husband comes home to die.
Q 14Baldwin's essay 'Stranger in the Village' grew out of stays in which country?
Switzerland
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.
Q 15What was Baldwin's first novel, published in 1953?
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Go Tell It on the Mountain: the semi-autobiographical novel draws on his fraught relationship with his stepfather.
Q 16Which US agency kept a file of more than 1,800 pages on Baldwin?
The FBI
The FBI: director J. Edgar Hoover even looked into banning Baldwin's novel Another Country as obscene.
Q 17Who is the teenage protagonist of Baldwin's 1953 debut novel?
John Grimes
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.
Q 18In a 1979 essay, Baldwin argued that what is a language in its own right?
Black English
Black English: Baldwin said Black Americans could not stop speaking it without suppressing the history that had formed it.
Q 19In which essay did Baldwin attack Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin?
Everybody's Protest Novel
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.
Q 20Which fellow novelist did Baldwin sharply portray in a 1961 Esquire essay?
Norman Mailer
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.
Q 24In Baldwin's story 'Sonny's Blues', which instrument does Sonny play?
Piano
Piano: his older brother, a high school algebra teacher, finally hears him play in a Greenwich Village club and begins to understand him.
Q 25Baldwin completed Another Country during a stay in which city?
Istanbul
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.
Q 26Which character's downfall opens Another Country?
Rufus Scott, a jazz drummer
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.
Q 27The Fire Next Time recounts dining with which Muslim leader?
Elijah Muhammad
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.
Q 28The first essay of The Fire Next Time is addressed to Baldwin's nephew on what anniversary?
The centenary of Emancipation
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.
Q 29Which magazine first ran 'Letter from a Region in My Mind', the long essay of The Fire Next Time?
The New Yorker
The New Yorker: in it Baldwin describes how, the summer he turned 14, fear of the evil around him drove him into the church.
Q 30The title The Fire Next Time comes from a couplet in what kind of song?
An African-American spiritual
An African-American spiritual: its couplet contrasts the Flood with the fire to come, drawing on the rainbow God showed Noah in Genesis.