A BOUT THE AUTHOR

J AMES BALDWIN WAS AN AMERICAN ESSAYIST, NOVELIST, POET, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subjects of race, sexuality, and social justice in America made him an important voice in the United States and, over his lifetime, through much of western Europe and Asia.

The eldest of nine children, he was born in 1924 in New York and grew up in the Black neighborhood of Harlem. After graduation from high school, he moved to Greenwich Village, the “bohemian quarter” of New York City, where he lived restlessly until he left for Paris in 1948. In later years, beginning in 1969, he became a “transatlantic commuter,” living alternately in the south of France, Istanbul, and New York.

He became an active participant in the civil rights struggle when he returned to the United States in 1957. That year, he began what would become a series of travels through the southern states to document the struggles of Black communities in real time. His second book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), explores Black-white relations through-out the United States. This theme was also central to his novel Another Country (1962), which continues his deep dive into sexual identity as well as racial politics.

Baldwin continued to write important works in both fiction and nonfiction over the next decades, publishing a half dozen new books, including a collaboration with his high school friend, the photographer Richard Avedon, called Nothing Personal, which appeared as an oversized art book and was reprinted several times, though the title essay did not appear on its own until the Beacon Press edition of 2021. Baldwin’s last book was his first collection of poetry, Jimmy’s Blues, reissued with a group of previously unpublished poems by Beacon Press in 2014. In 1985, he turned back to his beloved genre of the essay and created a large collection of most of his nonfiction, The Price of the Ticket (1948–1985). Some issues of copyright prevented that important volume from staying in print or appearing in paperback until now. The Beacon Press edition represents the first time this important work has been available in any format in almost thirty-five years. The publisher wishes to thank the Baldwin family and especially Jimmy’s sister, Gloria Karefa-Smart, for permission to bring the book back to the public.

Baldwin received numerous awards and was much sought after as a speaker, an activist, and a commentator until his untimely death, in 1987, in Saint Paul de Vence in the southeast of France.