"Baldwin on race is Baldwin on the white American psyche. . . . The Cross of Redemption becomes an absorbing portrait of Baldwin's time-and of him." -New York Review of Books
A revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form.
James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society.
Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, "If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one."
Inhaltsverzeichnis
INTRODUCTION
Looking for James Baldwin
ESSAYS AND SPEECHES
Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes
A Word from Writer Directly to Reader
From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute
to Twelve— A Forum
Theater: The Negro In and Out
Is A Raisin in the Sun a Lemon in the Dark?
As Much Truth as One Can Bear
Geraldine Page: Bird of Light
From What’ s the Reason Why? : A Symposium by Best-Selling
Authors: James Baldwin on Another Country
The Artist’ s Struggle for Integrity
We Can Change the Country
Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare
The Uses of the Blues
What Price Freedom?
The White Problem
Black Power
The Price May Be Too High
The Nigger We Invent
Speech from the Soledad Rally
A Challenge to Bicentennial Candidates
The News from All the Northern Cities Is, to Understate It, Grim;
the State of the Union Is Catastrophic
Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit
On Language, Race, and the Black Writer
Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption
Black English: A Dishonest Argument
This Far and No Further
On Being White . . . and Other Lies
Blacks and Jews
To Crush a Serpent
PROFILES
The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston
Sidney Poitier
LETTERS
Letters from a Journey
The International War Crimes Tribunal
Anti-Semitism and Black Power
An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis
A Letter to Prisoners
The Fire This Time: Letter to the Bishop
FOREWORDS AND AFTERWORDS
A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana
Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey
by Harold Norse
The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, 1626– 1940, edited by Roi
Ottley and William J. Weatherby
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether
A Lonely Rage by Bobby Seale
BOOK REVIEWS
Best Short Stories by Maxim Gorky
Mother by Maxim Gorky
The Amboy Dukes by Irving Shulman
The Sure Hand of God by Erskine Caldwell
The Sling and the Arrow by Stuart Engstrand
Novels and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by V. S. Pritchett;
and Robert Louis Stevenson by David Daiches
Flood Crest by Hodding Carter
The Moth by James M. Cain
The Portable Russian Reader, edited by Bernard Guilbert Guerney
The Person and the Common Good by Jacques Maritain
The Negro Newspaper by Vishnu V. Oak; Jim Crow America by Earl
Conrad; The High Cost of Prejudice by Bucklin Moon; The Protestant
Church and the Negro by Frank S. Loescher; Color and Conscience by
Buell G. Gallagher; From Slavery to Freedom by John Hope Franklin;
and The Negro in America by Arnold Rose
The Cool World by Warren Miller
Essays by Seymour Krim
The Arrangement by Elia Kazan
A Man’ s Life: An Autobiography by Roger Wilkins
FICTION
The Death of a Prophet
SOURCES
