Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Paperback) | James Baldwin

Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Paperback) | James Baldwin | Greatest American book of essays written in the twentieth century

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Notes of a Native ...

	Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Paperback) James Baldwin Beacon Press, 1984 - 176 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin's first nonfiction book has become a classic. These searing essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and Americans abroad remain as powerful today as when they were written.

"He named for me the things you feel but couldn't utter. . . . Jimmy's essays articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time."
-Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

brilliant, vivid, and incisive insights that shd be read

This is an absolutely wonderful book of essays about growing up, making a career, and being black in the US in the 1950-60s. Just the chapter on his step-father - an angry, brilliant, difficult man - is worth the price of admission. Beyond the black experience, everyone who has fought with a tough dad will empathise with Baldwin. Then there is a piece on living in France as a young writer, again it is unbelievably dense, funny, and moving, a true masterpiece of the genre of autobiographical essays. His style is so cool and clear, so icily brilliant, that any aspiring writer can study the style, as did I.

This book, in my opinion, has Baldwin's best work in it, of a quality that earns him a place in the literary canon. The essays really are far far better than any of his novels, in my opinion. While some of them are less than excellent journalistic pieces (A Fly in the Buttermilk about school integration), the best ones are, well, the best.

Warmly recommended.

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Greatest American book of essays written in the twentieth century

Baldwin writes with a force and an eloquence that will take your breath away mastery--a powerful preacher on the page. What he has to say about the state of race relations in this country is still relevant today, almost half a century after this book was first published. I consider Baldwin our greatest twentieth-century African American writer and one of the greatest American writers ever. He is courageous, passionate, visionary, and a masterful writer.

Classic American essays

Originally published in 1955 these essays are now considered American classics. Baldwin writes with tremendous pain, humor, and insight into the situation of what was then , 'the Negro' in America. He writes with insight into the situation of the young writer striving to locate himself in relation to Western civilization as a whole-which he feels he can never wholly belong to as he strives to belong to it. He writes most powerfully about the day of the dying of his father, and the birth of his youngest sister. His description of his own family situation, and of his father's life is instructive of the whole history of insult and injury which had long been the lot of the black in America. His estrangement from his father, and yet understanding of the story of his father's suffering is one of the powerful sections of the book.
It seems to me this book also has an effect unintended and unforeseen by Baldwin. Reading it fifty years later one understands how far America has come in transforming itself in regard to the racial question. Much of the kind of discrimination Baldwin so eloquently describes in for instance his story of his first jobs, does not exist in the same way any more.
In this sense the book also has along with its literary value , value as a historical document.

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Still Relevant After 40 Years

Notes of A Native Son, a series of essays written by James Baldwin in the late 40's and early 50s, still has many relevant things to say about the topics it covers, mainly race in America, nearly forty years after its publication. Baldwin takes on many subjects: he bites the hand of his former mentor, Richard Wright (in some old fashioned younger writer states why he is free from his older counselor style) in "Everybody's Protest Novel." Baldwin fights for the writer's right to create not from any political or social agenda, but merely for art's sake. But he also has trenchant and pointed things to say about race in American, and about white/black relations in general. In the concluding essay, "Stranger in the Village" he writes of the experience of being the first person of Africa descent to visit a small Swiss village. The prose is insightful and bold; the observations cutting and remorseless. Notes of A Native Son fully deserves its place in the pantheon of contemporary American classics.

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Baldwin is brilliant

Baldwin's reasoning, deduction and ability to convey deeply personal thoughts with such command and authority are part of what make this book of essays so riveting.
In "Notes of a Native Son" I began to understand more about the author through his relationship, or lack of relationship, with his father. And in "Equal in Paris or Stranger in the Village," I was transported into a dimension of racial prejudice that I have never experienced through prose before. As powerful today as it was then. A must read.

reviews: page 1, 2

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