By the age of 30, he was a household name, at which point he dared, at the height of his celebrity, to write, in 1956’s Giovanni’s Room and 1962’s Another Country, from the viewpoint of protagonists who were both white and gay, endearing himself to liberals and to fashionable society but suffering, as a result, “the label of bootlicker for making this point that categories can shut us off from the complexity within ourselves”. Nor is the trauma felt across black America in his parents’ generation when in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, crushing hopes for “fundamental change” that had been gathering around the US civil rights movement for the best part of a decade.Īs a figure of Glaude’s parents’ generation, Baldwin was both a giant and an anomaly – the kid from Harlem whose depiction of black American life through the great migration (in 1953’s Go Tell It on the Mountain) had made him a literary sensation while still in his 20s. The trauma of that inheritance – “our bodies carry the traumas forward,” Glaude writes – is never far from the page. Glaude, who is distinguished professor and chair of the African American studies department at Princeton University (where he has been teaching a seminar on Baldwin for several years), is also a native of Jackson County, Mississippi, the US state that suffered the highest number of lynchings – 581 between 18.

For many, Baldwin’s writing has long been a touchstone of anti-racist humanism, but the sense of that particular epithet has never landed more emphatically for me than while reading Eddie S Glaude Jr’s Begin Again, his potent meditation on the enduring legacy of Baldwin’s life and thought, a New York Times bestseller and one of a number of titles that have spoken to the soul of public outrage at George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis last May. M ichael Ondaatje once wrote that if Van Gogh was “our 19th-century artist-saint” then James Baldwin was “our 20th-century one”.

Begin again book eddie glaude