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Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin

Name: Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin
Author: James Campbell
ISBN: 9780520231306

by James Campbell

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Overview

James Baldwin was one of America's finest and most influential writers. By the time he died in 1987, his books, such as The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Giovanni's Room, had become modern classics.
James Campbell knew Baldwin for ten years before Baldwin's death. For this book, he interviewed many of Baldwin's friends and examined several hundred pages of correspondence. He quotes from the vast and disturbing file that the FBI compiled on Baldwin and he discusses Baldwin's sometimes turbulent relationships with Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Marlon Brando, as well as his friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. Elegantly written, candid, and original, Talking at the Gates is a comprehensive account of the life and work of a writer who believed that "the unexamined life is not worth living."

Synopsis

"Campbell's biography is scrupulously researched and also uncovers new material about Baldwin's life and offers a well-argued case for a re-reading of Baldwin's oeuvre. Campbell knew Baldwin well, but his affection for the man has not dulled his critical pen. When I first met Baldwin he referred me to Campbell as the man to talk to if I wished to know more about his life and work."—Caryl Phillips, author of The Atlantic Sound

Times Literary Supplement

Frank and affectionate.

About the Author, James Campbell

James Campbell is the author of This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris (California, 2001), Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank (1995), and
Invisible Country: A Journey through Scotland (1990). He works for the Times Literary Supplement.

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Editorials

Times Literary Supplement

Frank and affectionate.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Although Baldwin (1924-1987) ``carried his personal geography with him'' as an expatriate in Paris, he found his true subject in his own difficult personal history. A Holy Roller storefront preacher in Harlem at age 14, the maverick youth who never knew his father's identity carried over per original his oratorical delivery into his writings, channeling the rage that burned beneath his black skin into an investigation of ``the complex racial grief buried in the American soul.'' Yet, according to this marvelously illuminating literary biography, the hallmarks of Baldwin's moral vision--ambivalence, doubt, self-knowledge--faded in later works marred by his ``belligerent idea of the cathartic powers of art.'' In an affectionate yet critical portrait, Campbell, an editor of the Times Literary Supplement and a friend of Baldwin during the last decade of his life, provides new details on the writer's surveillance by the FBI, his fear of assassination, inner turmoil and his relationships with Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Norman Mailer and the Black Panthers. Photos. (May)

Library Journal

Talking at the Gates was the title of a novel about slaves that Baldwin had been planning to write for most of his life but never did. It is now the title of Campbell's new biography--a book that Baldwin, who died in 1987, never got to see either. Campbell writes with such compassionate authority that the reader immediately believes what he says. He concentrates on Baldwin's life as a writer, mentioning his homosexuality and romantic entanglements primarily to show their effects on his work. There is certainly no tawdry sensationalism. Instead, we are shown how Baldwin's world influenced his writing and how his writing, in turn, influenced the rest of the world. The numerous quotes drawn from the works of Baldwin and others are relevant to the tale and move it along smoothly. Plenty of information on both the Civil Rights Movement and Baldwin's contemporaries in the literary world is also provided. Campbell does not dwell on Baldwin's death. By picking a good point toward the end of Baldwin's life and ending there, he achieves a deeply touching dramatic affect. Highly recommended.-- Louis E. Cone, New York

School Library Journal

YA-- This eminently readable biography by a Scottish writer and teacher who knew Baldwin in his later years avoids hero worship and literary psychoanalysis. Instead, he lets Baldwin's life and words speak for themselves. The book will make an effective teaching tool for expanding YA's horizons on modern American history and literature as well as on minority literature and culture.