Celebrating James Baldwin

Happy Birthday, James Baldwin! The ground-breaking author of novels Giovanni’s Room and Another Country and essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time was born in New York on August 2, 1924. More recently James Baldwin’s work has experienced a revival because of the 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck and written by Baldwin.

“An Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, I Am Not Your Negro explores the continued peril America faces from institutionalized racism. In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends–Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind only thirty completed pages of his manuscript. Now, in his incendiary new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material.”

I Am Not Your Negro is 2017’s First-Year Student film and will be shown to all First-Year Students on Thursday, August 24. Before the 24, any Purchase College student, faculty, and staff can watch the film by logging in with your Purchase College credentials via Kanopy, an on-demand streaming video service: http://lsh.re/1HTE9

The Library also has several of Baldwin’s novels and essays in its collection. Browse them on our shelves and in our catalog.