James Baldwin
Story Stream
Refinding James Baldwin December 31, 2024
Fame after death can kill again. The historian knows this; the biographer knows this. No longer here to shape their own image, familiar figures become unknown to us. So many privacies now unguarded. The late James Baldwin, who died on the first of De...
James Baldwin’s Fraught Relationship With His Stepfather November 21, 2024
Baldwin describes how his father’s illness led to him “hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him.” As my father’s illness took over his brain, he would ...
Chasing James Baldwin’s Shadow in the South of France August 06, 2024
Since James Baldwin’s death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion’s final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life....
The Private Life: On James Baldwin August 05, 2024
In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?”But Baldwin’s...
The Fame Monsters August 02, 2024
CHARLOTTE TILBURY LAUNCHED ITS KIM K lipstick in 2016: a vibeless, neutral, basic bitch pink. Kim was in on it, of course. As Phillipa Snow writes in Trophy Lives, her riveting new illustrated essay about fame and art, Kim is “not only a perfectionis...
What James Baldwin Saw March 08, 2024
We begin with an image that conjures all manner of unspeakable horrors: the crumpled grimace of a Klansman. With this black-and-white photo—the first in a series of vintage pictures—the film I Heard It Through The Grapevine (1982) announces a history...
