I doubt that future societies will get on with him any better. It is for this reason that all societies have battled with the incorrigible disturber of the peace – the artist. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The state of birth, suffering, love, and death are extreme states – extreme, universal, and inescapable. I put the matter this way, not out of any desire to create pity for the artist – God forbid! – but to suggest how nearly, after all, is his state the state of everyone, and in an attempt to make vivid his endeavor. Or it is like the aloneness of love, the force and mystery that so many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever understood or ever really been able to control. It is like the fearless alone that one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering, whom we cannot help. The aloneness of which I speak is much more like the aloneness of birth or death. The state of being alone is not meant to bring to mind merely a rustic musing beside some silver lake. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed. Most of us are not compelled to linger with the knowledge of our aloneness, for it is a knowledge that can paralyze all action in this world. That all men are, when the chips are down, alone, is a banality – a banality because it is very frequently stated, but very rarely, on the evidence, believed. Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid the state of being alone. Novels included Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country and Just Above My Head as well as essay works like Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, and a collaboration with Richard Avedon, Nothing Personal, reissued on Taschen. As Juan Williams noted in the Washington Post, long before Baldwin’s death, his writings “became a standard of literary realism.” Best-sellers such as Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time acquainted wide audiences with his highly personal observations and his sense of urgency in the face of rising black bitterness. Bone declared that Baldwin’s publications “have had a stunning impact on our cultural life” because the author “… succeeded in transposing the entire discussion of American race relations to the interior plane it is a major breakthrough for the American imagination.” In his novels, plays, and essays alike, Baldwin explored the psychological implications of racism for both the oppressed and the oppressor. Baldwin’s writing career began in the last years of legislated segregation his fame as a social observer grew in tandem with the civil rights movement as he mirrored blacks’ aspirations, disappointments, and coping strategies in a hostile society. A novelist and essayist of considerable renown, James Baldwin, born in 1924 in New York City, bore articulate witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife.
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