Born: August 2, 1924, Harlem, NY

Education: DeWitt Clinton High School, graduated 1942

Died: December 1, 1987, St. Paul-de-Vence, France

Baldwin grew up poor and ambitious in Harlem. The combined influences of reading, a storefront church, and a student literary club (advised by poet Countee Cullen) put him on a path to writing. After finishing high school, he worked odd jobs and settled in Greenwich Village, where Richard Wright became his role model and mentor. But his 1949 and 1951 essays attacking Wright's Native Son irreparably alienated them.

Baldwin went on to an outstanding literary career, spending much of it among American intellectual and political exiles in Paris. A first-rate essayist, he authored six novels. Giovanni's Room (1956), using white characters, unveiled homoerotic relationships. He also wrote short stories, plays, and children's books, and reached his artistic summit in explorations of white racism, black protest, and civil rights. His was a powerful voice in the black freedom movement; he joined nonviolent protests and published critical race pieces, many of them reprinted in Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963), the latter coinciding with the March on Washington for jobs and freedom. By then, Baldwin had achieved “popularity and acclaim as the ‘conscience of the nation,’ who brought to racial discourse a passion and honesty that demanded notice” (Smith, 2010, p. 1).