James Baldwin

James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924; he never knew his father and was raised by a stern stepfather, a Baptist minister. He himself preached from the age of fourteen to seventeen in a Pentecostal church. Countee Cullen was his French teacher at junior high school, and he then studied at DeWitt Clinton High School. He left for Paris in 1948 with forty dollars. An essayist as much as a novelist and a figure of the civil rights movement, he settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the early 1970s, where he died in 1987.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelGiovanni's RoomJames Baldwin · 1956Literature