Books like Conversations with James Baldwin — picked by fans

This is still the most comprehensive and detailed account of the writer’s life and works. Leeming worked closely with Baldwin as an assistant and secretary after first meeting him in Istanbul. 

I love this book, for it was my introduction to Baldwin and his life as an exile and one of the most powerful social and cultural critics of twentieth-century America. It’s written accessibly—the life-story narrative flows easily and one feels the author’s compassion for and understanding of the writer’s evolution, process, as well as his specific works. 

It has taught me that the best biographies both reveal and conceal their authors’ personal investment in their subject and their own life stories. And that the best biographers must skillfully and passionately play with both.

Years ago when I first read it, it was helpful in overcoming my initial terror as an immigrant from the Other Europe, the terror that I… show more.

James Baldwin recalled that he wrote this book in between the assassinations of his friends Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. I have read numerous letters written by Baldwin, and this long essay, written during the 1960s, shares some of the intimacy found in his correspondence as he reflects on his role in the Civil Rights Movement.

It’s one of my favorite essays by Baldwin because it reveals his complexity and inconsistencies, giving glimpses into how he was torn between his role as a writer, artist, and activist. “[W]hat in the world was I by now,” Baldwin wonders,” but an aging, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakably erratic freak?” The writing is uneven in places, but the power and insight of Baldwin’s inimitable prose hold the essay together. 

This book grew out of the labor of love both scholarly and personal. It brings together three generations of scholars and diverse, interdisciplinary approaches to this complex and still largely misunderstood and underappreciated Black queer writer and theorist of 20th-century US identity. Michele Elam’s introduction deftly reevaluates and situates Baldwin as a 20th-century master for contemporary readers here and now, while the essays collected here provide cutting-edge scholarship and much nuance and fresh insight. Theoretically rich and with several exquisitely written essays, it touches upon all of the major aspects of the writer’s fascinating life and works.

This book, a collaboration with photographer Richard Avedon, is experimental, exhilarating, and exasperating. I’ve always been drawn to it, which includes striking portraits by Avedon (Marilyn Monroe, Civil Rights workers, Allen Ginsberg) alongside Baldwin’s gnomic and haunting essay.

Panned by the New York Times in 1964, the book has been overlooked by scholars and fans of Baldwin’s work, which encouraged me to return to this troubling book. Published shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nothing Personal offers up a portrait of the United States as complex and dangerous. Baldwin’s rage at the state of America is apparent, but I’m drawn to his writing about love, which he sees as key to the country’s future: 

“The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another,” Baldwin writes, “the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out.”

This book artfully introduces the real and important backstory of Lorraine Hansberry, whom I had previously known only as the author of A Raisin In The Sun, a play about a Black middle-class family in Chicago. I was surprised, impressed, and thoroughly educated about Lorraine–a lesbian, Black, radical feminist and socialist, who died of cancer at the age of 34 in 1965.

I was amazed to learn about her ideas, her courage, her ability to maintain a simultaneous activist preoccupation with race, gender, and class throughout her life, and her tight three-party friendship with James Baldwin and Nina Simone. I had an intriguing, intimate, and important view of a world of 1960s USA Black intellectual and activist life, opened up wide for me by a talented author. 

Cohen spent a year driving through America accompanied only by two crates of books. She realised, reading them, how many of their authors had met, more or less significantly, one another, from Mark Twain and Henry James to James Baldwin and Elizabeth Bishop. The result was this daisy-chain book. It’s fascinating, illuminating, and utterly charming.

This is an angry book.

Rereading it made me angry all over again. Much about U.S. race relations has improved since Baldwin's essay was published in 1963. But rereading it now, after six decades when I myself have sometimes been active in anti-racist efforts, I was stunned by how penetrating and accurate his critique remains, and how enduring the depredations he described back then have proven to be.

And yet! And yet, the writing is suffused with empathy and, disarmingly, even with love. Discrimination and inequality made Baldwin a militant, but he never turned mean and never embraced violence. He is a model of how to stay humane.

This book is a brilliant collection of essays highlighting “race rebels,” where Kelley looks outside of traditional politics and organized movements to find Black resistance to forces such as white supremacy, labor exploitation, and war. Kelley focuses in on the everyday lives of working-class Black men and women, highlighting a “hidden transcript” of expression and resistance in things like music, language, dance, and choice of dress.  He elevates the political potential found in these cultural elements, urging historians to see these “style politics” in the social and economic contexts which give rise to them, for they are powerful and worthy of our attention.

Black southern mass action against segregation commenced in Montgomery, AL with the 1955-56 bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr., to national fame, then finally broke through U. S. presidential ambivalence with the 1963 protests in Birmingham that were met with heavily-photographed police violence, and culminated with the 1965 Selma marches that led to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act. These three Alabama cities represent the cornerstones of that dramatic 1955-1965 decade, and Thornton’s magisterial account of those movements’ local roots make it perhaps the most interpretively significant work of civil rights history ever written. A very close second is Adam Fairclough’s Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972.

I love this book because it shows Southerners fighting against racial segregation for decades prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. John Egerton wanted to show the civil rights movement in the south from 1932 to 1954.

He wanted to name all the people he could who participated. He thought the book would take two years to finish, but it took him six. His research pulls back a veil that covers fights against racism in the American South prior to the 1954 Supreme Court Brown Decision.