Baldwin's Harlem

Publishers Weekly

Although James Baldwin (1924-1987) left his native Harlem as a young man and returned only for occasional visits, the New York neighborhood was a recurring theme in his essays and novels, and critics often claimed that the noted African-American writer exploited its squalor. His junior high French teacher was luminary Countee Cullen, who may have inspired Baldwin's later Paris sojourn and his first literary efforts, and Baldwin shared a stormy relationship with another Harlem Renaissance progenitor, poet Langston Hughes, who called Another Countryjuvenile. Baldwin shared a distrust of white liberals with Malcolm X and lent his powerful voice to Harlem's '60s causes, including a rent-strike rally and defense of the Harlem Six put on trial for the brutal murder of a Jewish shopkeeper. Longtime Harlem resident Boyd, managing editor of Black World Today, is authoritative, but in his self-proclaimed role as Baldwin's defender, he gives short shrift to the writer's homosexuality and comes across as rationalizing the anti-Semitism Baldwin was repeatedly accused of in his lifetime. The literary critiques of Baldwin's writings and other details render this volume primarily of interest to scholars of African-American studies (Jan.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

School Library Journal

Born in Harlem in 1924, James Baldwin was raised and educated there at a time when the glories of the Harlem Renaissance were giving way to the dark days of the Great Depression. In his latest effort, prolific writer and journalist Boyd (Harlem Reader) focuses on the powerful role Harlem played in Baldwin's life and work. He traces the influence of Countee Cullen, who taught Baldwin French in junior high school, and of literary models like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. He explores Baldwin's call to the pulpit, his religious crisis, his coming to terms with his homosexuality, and his responses to the Civil Rights Movement, black nationalism, and the conflicts between Jews and blacks in Harlem. Throughout, he defends Baldwin against his detractors, particularly the self-proclaimed gadfly Harold Cruse. Boyd's interviews with Michael Thelwell (Univ. of Massachusetts) and Quincy Troup round out the volume. Given its narrow scope, this work will probably appeal most to readers already familiar with Baldwin. Those new to the author's life and work may want the broader context provided by David Leeming's James Baldwin: A Biographyor William Weatherby's James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
—William Gargan Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

A slender but sturdy life of the centrifugal author at home in New York. Baldwin was many things; consistent is not necessarily one of them. Boyd (Pound for Pound: A Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, 2005) notes that Baldwin was "committed to black radicalism" and a fellow traveler of Malcolm X, yet not so committed to the cause as to endorse younger activists such as Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who returned the favor. We meet Cleaver as he and Baldwin were supposedly kissing at a 1967 dinner party in San Francisco, "a graphic contradiction of [Cleaver's] merciless attack on Baldwin's homosexuality, or an indication of his own deep-seated sexual ambivalence." Baldwin advocated racial rapprochement, telling Harlem schoolchildren, "Color doesn't matter. Color is a political reality which certain politicians use. There is no moral value to black or white skin." Yet he excused his vigorous anti-Semitism by saying that nearly all blacks in Harlem, after all, hated Jews: "We hated them because they were terrible landlords, and did not take care of the building." Baldwin, writes Boyd, was a student of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen and was active in the small literary circle that succeeded the movement. Yet where Cullen was concerned with community-building, Baldwin seems to have thrived on feuds, such as a long-running one with Langston Hughes and, calculated to fuel anti-Semitic sentiments, another fierce one with Norman Mailer. Boyd traces those conflicts to their roots, delivering a refined sort of literary gossip ennobled by substance: We hear, for instance, of Henry Louis Gates's running argument with Baldwin over whether Harriet Beecher Stowe was a worthy writer, ofAmiri Baraka's dismissal of Baldwin for not being a sufficient revolutionary and so forth. Less thorough than James Campbell's Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991), but still of much interest to students of recent American letters.