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RARE & SECONDHAND GAY RARE & SECONDHAND
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Non-Fiction of Gay Interest
Content: "James Baldwin was one of America's finest and most influential writers. By the time he died in 1987, his books, such as The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room, had become modern classics. "Baldwin was born into the squalor of a Harlem tenement and transcended an early life of little encouragement and many setbacks. Deeply affected by the religious tyranny of his mad stepfather, Baldwin himself became a storefront preacher by the age of fourteen. Before he was twenty, he was supporting his whole family - his mother and eight brothers and sisters. Although he never went to college, he wrote for the most prestigious journals, The Partisan Review, Commentary and others. "A self-exile from the United States, whose racial problems he found both repelling and fascinating, Baldwin lived in Paris, Geneva, Istanbul, never settling anywhere, always fleeing. He was a great drinker and socializer, though his periods of wild gregariousness were broken by equally intense, self-imposed, almost monastic retreats during which he wrote feverishly. Unpredicatable, unreliable, self-dramatizing, self-mythologizing, few, irresistible, generous and jealous, he was haunted by his fame, his sexuality and his color. "This literary biography takes its title from Baldwin's great unwritten opus, a slave novel that he planned in excess but never finished. Elegantly written, candid and original, Talking at the Gates presents a comprehensive accound of the life and work a writer who believed that 'the unexamined life is not worth living.'" (from the cover) Background / Biography: "James Campbell knew Baldwin for ten years before Baldwin's death. Since then he has interviewed many of Baldwin's friends and examined several hundred pages of correspondence. He quotes from the vast and disturbing file that the FBI compiled on Baldwin, and he discusses Baldwin's sometimes turbulent relationships with Norman Mailer, Richard Wrght and Marlon Brando, as well as his strong friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. "James Campbell was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1951. Between 1978 and 1982 he was editor of The New Edinburgh Review. He is the author of Invisible Country: A Journey Through Scotland and Gate Fever: Voices from a Prison. He lives in London and works for The Times Literary Supplement. (from the cover) Reviews: Arbery Books also sells secondhand and rare non-gay fiction and non-fiction. Click here for our full list. |
"'I never had a childhood,' James Baldwin told a French interviewer in 1974. To a journalist ten years earlier, he proclaimed, 'I did not have any human identity.' To his French interviewer he added, for good measure, 'I was born dead.' He was in fact born in the Harlem Hospital at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, New York City, on 2 August 1924, illegitimate, James Arthur to Emma Berdis Jones. She was not yet twenty years old and lately arrived in New York City from Deals Island, Maryland, caught in the northward drift which was sweeping thousands of her race and generation out of the strictly segregated Southern states. Emma Berdis knew the name of her first child's father, but she would not tell her son, and he never found out. 'I never had a childhood' means, partly, 'I never had a father'." opening paragraphs Secondhand booksellers |
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