JAMES BALDWIN (1924–1987) learned the power of words early in his life: by the age of fourteen he was preaching in Harlem’s Fireside Pentecostal Church. Three years later, Baldwin left the church and Harlem for Greenwich Village and, eventually, for Europe, where he pursued a career as a writer. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was a semiautobiographical coming-of-age story about the family tensions and ultimate religious conversion of fourteen-year-old John Grimes. Better regarded than Baldwin’s novels were his essays: Baldwin wrote passionately about black identity, white hypocrisy, and civil rights in America, as well as about war, sexuality, and other political and cultural issues. What do you know about Baldwin? Try this “simple” James Baldwin quiz.
TRUE OR FALSE?
1. James Baldwin argued eloquently that so-called Black English was not a real language.
2. At Frederick Douglass Junior High School, Baldwin studied with the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen.
3. Novels like Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962) were controversial because they dealt with homosexuality and interracial relationships.
4. The first essay in Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) was structured as a letter to white America.
5. Baldwin wrote extensively on American political life from France and never returned to the United States after 1948.
ANSWERS
1. False. Just the opposite: Baldwin called Black English “a language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality.”
2. True. Cullen instructed Baldwin in French.
3. True.
4. False. It was a letter to his fourteen-year-old nephew and namesake, written on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.
5. False. He returned to the United States various times, including in the late 1960s to participate in the civil rights movement and in the 1980s as the Five Colleges Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.