Last night I was casually wandering through Barnes & Noble in Union Square waiting for a friend and I happened upon James Baldwin's "No Name In the Street"-- one of three essay collections of his I did not own. So I immediately purchased it. That night I opened it up and began reading and couldn't stop. Baldwin, in my opinion, is one of the most profound American writers to ever pick up a pen and draw blood from the page. His writing is always crisp, penetrating, deeply insightful, boiling with passionate articulation and furious intellect. No one writes about race, politics, and religion with his sort of razor sharp wit and masterful precision.
Baldwin's enormous genius spreads through many noteworthy essays like "Notes on A Native Son," "Nobody Knows My Name," a personal favorite "The Devil Finds Work," plus many fiction works such as "Just Above My Head," "Go Tell It On the Mountain," "Giovanni's Room" and a host of others. This command of language and his desire to be truthful at all costs--no matter how complex or painful, is what makes him so provocative.
For me, reading "No Name in the Street" proves Baldwin is always unflinching and brutally honest when exposing the often painful paradoxes of America, specifically being Black in America. The first Baldwin book I discovered was "The Fire Next Time." It was sitting on my father's book shelf, a small tattered copy. That scorching, explosive commentary on race changed something in me. Even, then, at the age of 15, I knew the magnificent power of that sort of writing and I was shaken to the core. I didn't even read it again until I was a sophomore in college--and I was shook even harder after that. It means even more to me as I age. That kind of mesmerizing hold a work can have on someone is not to be taken lightly. Baldwin writes with such uncompromising lucidity that he can access what at times feels unutterable and magnify these disturbing truths with tremendous vision and conviction--which is the mission of any serious writer.
"It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. " - James Baldwin
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