JAMES BALDWIN - Randall Kenan / Amy Sickeles

With the success of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin made an indelible mark on the literary world. A Minority within a minority, Baldwin – a gay black man in a predominantly white, heterosexual culture – was often viewed as an outsider. From his days as preacher in Harlem on through his active participation in the Civil Rights Movement Baldwin continued to stress the importance of love above all notions of gender and race.

Though James Baldwin built his reputation on his novels, his nonfictional prose, according to Harold Bloom, ensures him a place as "the most considerable moral essayist . . . in the United States." Works such as The Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street challenged the country to help liberate humankind.

This title, James Baldwin, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of James Baldwin through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition, this title features a short biography on James Baldwin, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.

Raised in Chinquapin, North Carolina, Randall Kenan is the author of the novel A Visitation of Spirits and the short story collection Let The Dead Bury Their Dead. The latter was nominated for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. After the success of A Visitation of Spirits, Kenan began working on a new book. More than a dozen years ago, he rented a car and set out from New York on a cross-country journey to interview African Americans. The title of the book that resulted, Walking on Water, comes from the story of slaves en route from Africa who commandeered their ship off the coast of Georgia around 1800. Legend has it that they walked off the ship to an unknown fate. In his book, Kenan attempts to learn that fate. When he isn't writing, Kenan teaches writing classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. He is also a contributor to the New York Times and The Nation and was once an assistant editor at Knopf.