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The Fire Next Time

Name: The Fire Next Time
Author: James Baldwin
ISBN: 9780679601517

by James Baldwin

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Overview

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

At once a powerful evocation of his childhood in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, The Fire Next Time, which galvanized the nation in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, stands as one of the essential works of our literature. (Vintage)February

About the Author, James Baldwin

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torch-bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

Biography

James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, and educated in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews and immediately was recognized as establishing a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else," he remarked. Baldwin's play The Amen Corner was first performed at Howard University in 1955 (it was staged commercially in the 1960s), and his acclaimed collection of essays Notes of a Native Son, was published the same year. A second collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, was published in 1961 between his novels Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1961).

The appearance of The Fire Next Time in 1963, just as the civil rights movement was exploding across the American South, galvanized the nation and continues to reverberate as perhaps the most prophetic and defining statement ever written of the continuing costs of Americans' refusal to face their own history. It became a national bestseller, and Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Critic Irving Howe said that The Fire Next Time achieved "heights of passionate exhortation unmatched in modern American writing." In 1964 Blues for Mister Charlie, his play based on the murder of a young black man in Mississippi, was produced by the Actors Studio in New York. That same year, Baldwin was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and collaborated with the photographer Richard Avedon on Nothing Personal, a series of portraits of America intended as a eulogy for the slain Medger Evers. A collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man, was published in 1965, and in 1968, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, his last novel of the 1960s appeared.

In the 1970s he wrote two more collections of essays and cultural criticism: No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976). He produced two novels: the bestselling If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979) and also a children's book Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976). He collaborated with Margaret Mead on A Rap on Race (1971) and with the poet-activist Nikki Giovanni on A Dialogue (1973). He also adapted Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X into One Day When I Was Lost.

In the remaining years of his life, Baldwin produced a volume of poetry, Jimmy's Blues (1983), and a final collection of essays, The Price of the Ticket. Baldwin's last work, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), was prompted by a series of child murders in Atlanta. Baldwin was made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor in June 1986. Among the other awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Partisan Review fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant.

James Baldwin died at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in France on December 1, 1987.

Author biography courtesy of Random House, Inc.

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Editorials

Sacred Fire

"God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"

So opens James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. It comprises two previously published essays in the form of personal letters. The first is a letter to his nephew written on the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation that attacks the idea that blacks are inferior to whites. The second, a much longer letter addressed to all Americans, recounts Baldwin's coming-of-age in Harlem, appraises black nationalism, and discusses in detail the connection between racism and Christianity. Written in the heat of the civil rights era, the book reflects Baldwin's passion for justice and his iconoclastic ideas about the revolutionary power of love in the battle for America's survival.

Baldwin spares neither blacks, whites, Muslims, nor Christians from his hard analysis. He condemns the role Christianity has had in fostering white Americans' sense of superiority and disconnection from reality. Baldwin sees Christianity as an obstacle rather than a conduit to better relations between the races. The black church, too, is guilty for encouraging self-hatred and despair among its followers. In Baldwin's view, the Nation of Islam's literally black-and-white theology, wherein the god-sanctioned racism of whites is reversed, merely appropriates the self-destructive tendencies of white Christianity. His frustration with racism is that it is a needless impediment to the true purpose of life: to explore the possibilities of existence with courage, to search for enlightenment that can be passed on to posterity. Willingly containing ourselves in the rigid, artificial box of race serves only to prevent us from finding real meaning in our lives and increases the amount of needless suffering in the world.

The Fire Next Time is probably Baldwin's finest and fiercest book. As a child, Baldwin was a preacher in an evangelistic store-front church in Harlem; in The Fire Next Time, he draws on the language and imagery of the Old Testament prophets to paint an almost apocalyptic picture of American race relations. With equal fervor, he paints a courageous picture of his unique vision of an ideal American society, one rid of racial barriers and premised on love and respect. The book captured the attention of Americans in the throes of the civil rights era, and was an immediate bestseller when it was published. It is now regarded as one of the most brilliant and important books to come out of that era, and Baldwin's fiery plea for love in the face of hatred retains its power for readers today.