Among the many grievances aired by Norman Podhoretz in his insufferable 1967 memoir Making It is an already septic grudge concerning The New Yorker’s publication of James Baldwin’s most famous essay in 1962. Titled, following the magazine’s convention, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” this twenty-thousand word assemblage of memoir, reportage, and philosophical interrogation of the American condition that has become Baldwin’s rhetorical signature was filed by Baldwin as “Down at the Cross,” the name it would retain when reprinted the next year as the second part of The Fire Next Time. According to Podhoretz, not long after succeeding Eliot Cohen in the wake of the founding editor’s suicide, he commissioned Baldwin to write a piece on the Nation of Islam, whose ascendance in New York alongside the sect’s most prominent minister, Malcolm X, was disconcerting the magazine’s white, liberal, and mostly Jewish readership. Around the same time, The New Yorker asked Baldwin for a dispatch from Africa, then in the midst of postcolonial revolt. In 1958, longtime fiction editor William Maxwell, an admirer of Baldwin’s first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, collected from contributions to Commentary, The New Leader, The Reporter, Partisan Review, and Harper’s, had solicited Baldwin for unpublished work, and in July 1961, then-New Yorker EIC William Shawn signed a series of letters addressed to the authorities in the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and Guinea identifying Baldwin as a New Yorker correspondent.
Though the trip to Africa, via Istanbul — where Baldwin resided throughout his life, when not living in France or his native New York — and Israel, came to fruition, the New Yorker assignment did not. His sense that, as an American, he had both too little and too much to say about the continent, which he detailed in letters to his agent, Robert Mills (later published in Harper’s as “Letters from a Journey”), weighed on him, as did the $5,500 advance — more than $58,000 in today’s currency — that he had received from the most prestigious outlet of literary journalism, and which he had likely already spent. Baldwin followed through on the Commentary assignment to a point, traveling to Chicago to interview Elijah Muhammad, but when Podhoretz requested the manuscript, Baldwin turned cagey: he didn’t have it, and neither did Mills. Instead, it was on Shawn’s desk, where, Baldwin insisted, rejection was imminent, upon which all eighty-one pages would be duly forwarded to Commentary, excusing this unexpected detour as a goodwill gesture of contrition for past negligence, with a whiff of noblesse oblige. Podhoretz knew that Shawn’s budget and distribution far exceeded his own (Baldwin’s last review for Commentary, of Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess, paid only $100), not to mention the triumphant significance of a New Yorker acceptance to any writer’s career. Unsurprisingly, given the essay’s genius, Shawn approved, reserving most of the November 17 issue for its inclusion, and sending along another check for $6,500. The hefty advance was not the only uncharacteristic aspect of Shawn’s decision, as Ben Yagoda notes in About Town: “Down at the Cross” was the New Yorker’s first elaborate treatment on the subject of race, and eluded the established rubrics of the magazine, which was not then in the habit of publishing essays of opinion. It is what eventually inspired Shawn to introduce a “Reflections” section. When Dial Press republished the essay in 1963, appended by “A Letter to My Nephew,” initially purchased by The Progressive, Baldwin earned another $65,000 — for one essay and a brief, if unforgettable introduction, just shy of $800,000 in 2025.
This is by no means an unheard of amount in the world of publishing, which has doled out advances of $15 million to Bill Clinton and Britney Spears, but as the editor of a little magazine — and, he thought, a friend — Podhoretz was irate, and told Baldwin so. Baldwin had business savvy, but his record was not flawless: Holiday editor Harry Sions’s interest soured when Baldwin sent him a manuscript concerning “the present French-Algerian problem and many other political problems in France,” an ill fit for the travel magazine, thus missing out on a healthy paycheck; The Reporter didn’t go for it either, in spite of the remorse they must have felt over refusing Baldwin’s pitch to review Invisible Man in 1952 because “it has already been assigned to one of our staff members, a friend of Ellison, by the way” (a “too short” submission on Booker T. Washington to American Mercury, which would become an organ of the American Nazi Party before the end of the next decade, was returned in 1949 for not coming “to close enough quarters with the issues involved”). “No greater violation of the ethics of the trade could be imagined than Baldwin had committed in taking an article he had been invited to write by the editor of one magazine and giving it to the editor of another,” Podhoretz scolds in Making It, though this is a common, albeit frowned-upon, practice, and over drinks, Podhoretz said that Baldwin “had dared to commit such a dastardly act because he was a Negro, and had been counting on the white-liberal guilt that he knew so much about, that he was such a great connoisseur of, to enable him to get away with it. And he had gotten away with it — he who went around preaching the value of ‘paying one’s dues.’” His resentment toward African Americans thus acidly expressed, Podhoretz explained to Baldwin the discrimination he had faced as a child in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to which Baldwin responded, eyes blazing “even more fiercely than usual,” “You ought to write all that down.”
Podhoretz did write it down, calling it “My Negro Problem — And Ours,” and published it in the February 1963 issue of Commentary. This confessional provocation signals the beginning of the rightward shift in Podhoretz’s politics — when Baldwin died, in 1987, the editor was widely recognized as one of the architects of neoconservatism — which Baldwin, in his half-ironic encouragement, must have glimpsed. In fact, Podhoretz’s break with the mid century anti-Stalinist left, a loose faction of mostly Jewish writers, editors, and academics who have come to be known as the New York Intellectuals, occurred almost simultaneously with Baldwin’s, though they broke in opposite directions. In 1991, Podhoretz’s fellow second-generation New York Intellectual-cum-neocon Daniel Bell compiled a genealogy of the group from 1935 to 1965, mentioning Baldwin and only one other African American (Ralph Ellison) among the first generation’s “gentile cousins.” The majority of names Bell lists were directly affiliated with Baldwin, as early supporters of his writing (Cohen, Lionel Trilling, William Phillips, Alfred Kazin, Nicola Chiaramonte, Mary McCarthy, Jason Epstein, Stephen Spender), editors (Philip Rahv at Partisan Review, Podhoretz and Robert Warshow at Commentary, Irving Kristol and Melvin Lasky at Encounter, Robert Silvers at Harper’s), reviewers (Paul Goodman, Irving Howe), friends (Ellison, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth), correspondents (Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag), and acquaintances (the “European Intelligentsia” of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir) — an expression of the centrality of Baldwin’s role in this history.
By the time of Baldwin’s New Yorker debut — his sole byline in the magazine — his journalistic efforts were increasingly found on glossy pages: Esquire, Mademoiselle, The New York Times Magazine, and later, Playboy, Life, Look, McCall’s, and New York. It is tempting to read this shift through the logic of “selling out,” as Baldwin, in an unpublished essay, contrasted the milieu of nineteenth-century literati with that of the American writer of the twentieth century, which places him “in competition with a language whose entire function is to disturb no-one, and to reveal nothing,” i.e., “the language in which Life magazine is written, or McCalls or the Reader’s Digest.” But as the civil rights movement approached its climax, Baldwin’s vocation as a writer of prose gave way to popular demand that he serve as a spokesman (though he preferred the term “witness”) of his race, which his conscience could not resist and which his skill at extemporaneous speech, honed as a boy preacher in Harlem, overqualified him. It was not long before he was more frequently the subject of magazine articles than their author — the May 17, 1963 issue of Time featured his face on its cover — and a sought-after guest on television and radio broadcasts, in lecture and debate halls, at rallies, benefits, and gatherings of the cultural and political elite.
In our century he might have ended up a talking head, but celebrity took its toll in his own: The Fire Next Time, followed though it was by three novels, three works of nonfiction, a collection each of short stories and poems, two plays, a screenplay, a children’s book, book-length collaborations with photographer Richard Avedon, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and poet Nikki Giovanni, and dozens of published interviews and essays, represents the pinnacle of Baldwin’s commercial and critical success. The decades since his passing have cemented a handful of his novels — Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and to a lesser extent, Another Country and If Beale Street Could Talk — within the American canon, and this is the work for which Baldwin repeatedly professed the most pride. In a 1984 interview with The Paris Review, he dismissed his essays as dutiful juvenilia, a desperate attempt to get “beyond the chaos,” though his involvement in civil rights confirmed the role he had to play: “I didn’t think of myself as a public speaker, or as a spokesman, but I knew I could get a story past the editor’s desk. And once you realize that you can do something, it would be difficult to live with yourself if you didn’t do it.”
The repercussions of slavery that defined, from the start, the purview of these essays was a subject of which black people, Darryl Pinckney has observed, “were very aware”; however, “it would take some time for the books that black people read at home to get on the curriculum of what white students read in school. Much of what they would read hadn’t been lost or forgotten so much as suppressed. But then it is a tradition of black intellectual life in America that every generation finds it necessary to reassess what is going on with black people.” A hundred years after his birth, we find ourselves in the midst of another such reassessment, in which Baldwin’s oeuvre, banned in several states and demonized as a progenitor of “wokeness” in spite and because of the self-serving neoliberal sanitization of his bile, has taken center stage. The words that he wrote to his nephew at the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation — “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon” — have never rung more true, and his avuncular assurance, that “we cannot be free until they are free,” feels messianic, still.
This sense may not be the consequence of a fault in Baldwin’s optimism — which radically declined in his nonfiction, alongside his popularity, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 — any more than it is a failure of the now crumbling institutional edifice that once subsidized him. That, as a young autodidact with little more than a high school diploma and a brilliant mind, he was able to crawl out of poverty to the status of cultural titan by means of writing inflammatory literary journalism which continues to torment conservatives four decades after his death is nothing short of remarkable. Like King’s, his direct, unsparing appeals to the bourgeois values of white liberal America made him as many enemies on the left as on the right, but the exuberance of the mainstream press both to recognize and champion his genius, if only for a time, accentuates the sorry state of the Fourth Estate at present. Even as his politics of love have been selectively codified into liberal orthodoxy, for reasons as ideological as they are economic, it is difficult to imagine a writer of his immense talent and tenacious perspective getting away with it today.
From his first publication (a poem, “Nursery Rhyme” in the May 21, 1945 issue of New Masses), to his last (“To Crush the Serpent,” for Playboy in June 1987), Baldwin’s gift for language took him down many circuitous paths: reporter, playwright, director, activist, screenwriter, professor (for Bowling Green State University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, though he held no degree). But it was as a novelist, he told biographer and former secretary David Leeming, that he wanted to be remembered. In “Autobiographical Notes,” his preface to Notes of a Native Son, he writes that, as a child, “I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities over and over again; in this way, in fact, I read just about everything I could get my hands on — except the Bible, probably because it was the only book I was encouraged to read.” Later, he told The Paris Review, “I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen,” and he later found his way to Dostoevsky, Balzac, Henry James, and Proust. The eldest son of Emma Berdis Jones, a housekeeper, Baldwin grew up in Harlem believing that her much older husband, lay preacher David Baldwin, was his biological father, and assumed the responsibility of raising his younger half-siblings who, on the day his stepfather was buried in 1943, were eight in number. Then nineteen, Baldwin’s talents had already been recognized by a number of influential mentors: Orilla “Bill” Miller, a white teacher at P.S. 24 who introduced to him to the theatre and cinema; Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, his French teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High, who recommended that he apply to DeWitt-Clinton High, in the Bronx, where his friends on the staff of the literary magazine, The Magpie, included Avedon, writer Emile Capouya, and editor Sol Stein, who would publish Notes in 1955 during his tenure at Beacon Press (his English teacher at DeWitt-Clinton, Abel Meeropol, wrote the lyrics to “Strange Fruit” and later adopted the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg). In 1941, Capouya, who was instrumental in Baldwin’s departure from the pulpit for Greenwich Village, introduced Baldwin to painter Beauford Delaney. Baldwin sat nude for a portrait, Dark Rapture, on his first visit, and Delaney soon became a surrogate father to him, remaining one of his closest confidantes, despite struggles with alcoholism and mental illness, until his death in 1979.
It was Richard Wright who taught Baldwin how to drink when, in 1945, the admiring aspirant knocked on his door in Brooklyn. Impressed by early drafts of Crying Holy, published by Knopf as Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953 (with a paltry advance of $750, $250 of which was paid upfront) the author of Native Son recommended Baldwin for the Eugene F. Saxton literary fellowship, the second of several awards which, biographer Bill V. Mullen stresses, “literally kept Baldwin from starving” — from the League of American Writers, a Communist Party front, in 1942; $667 from the Julius Rosenwald Fund in 1948; some small fraction of $1 million from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1954; $1,000 from the National Institute of Arts & Letters in 1956, and more from Partisan Review; $300 from the Longview Foundation and a whopping $12,000 from the Ford Foundation in 1959; as well as residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. The Saxton fellowship net him $500, more than three times his 1944 income of $172.25, from gigs at the U.S. Postal Service and the Office of War Information. As the oldest boy of an impoverished family, he had been excused from military service in the Second World War. Baldwin spent most of the 1940s doing contract labor for the Army in New Jersey, at a meat-packing plant in Harlem, washing dishes and waiting tables at the Calypso restaurant in the Village (where he encountered major black intellectuals such as Claude McKay, Alain Locke, and C. L. R. James), and as a messenger for the New York progressive daily, PM, when he was not “hanging around” the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research, where he befriended Marlon Brando in 1944, or trying to write.
Around this time, Baldwin recalls in the introduction to his 1985 volume of collected nonfiction, The Price of the Ticket, Sol Levitas, editor of The New Leader, recommended that writing reviews at the rate of one book per week would be a beneficial discipline for a newcomer with his ambition. Baldwin could not remember the context in which this invitation was extended, but it probably had something to do with his association with the Young People’s Socialist League, which he was urged to join by a friend from Harlem, Eugene Worth. (Worth’s suicide in 1946 off of the George Washington Bridge inspired the demise of Rufus Scott in Baldwin’s best-selling novel, Another Country, published in 1962.) The New Leader was founded in 1924 — the year that Baldwin was born, a hundred-some blocks uptown — by James Oneal, one of the charter members of the Socialist Party of America. Levitas’ editorship steered the publication in the direction of liberal anti-communism. Baldwin, then a Trotskyite, “was in the interesting position . . . of being an anti-Stalinist when America and Russia were allies,” but downplayed the import of politics in his biography: “My life on the Left is of absolutely no interest. It did not last long. It was useful in that I learned that it may be impossible to indoctrinate me; also, revolutionaries tend to be sentimental and I hope that I am not.” These sympathies, nonetheless, endeared him to Levitas and poet Randall Jarrell, then literary editor at The Nation (which, in the author bio appearing below his 1966 essay “A Report from Occupied Territory,” proudly but incorrectly claims that “Mr. Baldwin’s first published work was a review in this publication”), as well as Cohen, Warshow, and Rahv. The New Leader paid him only $10 or $20 per review, but he published twelve in the magazine between 1947 and 1948, writing on Maxim Gorky, Erskine Caldwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ross Lockridge Jr. (who killed himself within weeks of Baldwin’s review) and James M. Cain. His second review for The Nation, “Smaller than Life,” panned a biography of Frederick Douglass by Shirley Graham, W. E. B. Du Bois’ future wife, exercising arguments he would expand further in his inaugural, companion essays for Partisan Review, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Many Thousands Gone.” “Most of the books I reviewed were Be Kind to Niggers, Be Kind to Jews, while America was going through one of its liberal convulsions,” he told The Paris Review: “People suddenly discovered they had a Jewish problem, with books like Gentleman’s Agreement, Earth and High Heaven, or they discovered they had niggers, with books like Kingsblood Royal and Quality. Thousands of such tracts were published during those years and it seems to me I had to read every single one of them; the color of my skin made me an expert. And so, when I got to Paris, I had to discharge all that.”
In 1948, Baldwin splurged what remained of his fellowship money on a plane ticket to Paris, where Wright had relocated in 1946 (Delaney would do the same in 1953), arriving with $40 in his pocket and, according to biographer James Campbell, reporting his occupation to the passport office as “Foreign Correspondent” for Partisan Review, although he had not yet been published in the magazine. It was in Europe — Paris, the Riviera, Corsica, and Switzerland — that Baldwin finally emerged as a novelist, completing Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, which was declined by Knopf for the dubious market value of its gay, non-black subject matter, then purchased by Dial for a modest $2,000 in 1956. But along the way, he pioneered a style of first-person reportage that is now referred to as New Journalism. This designation, most often associated with Baldwin’s white contemporaries Mailer, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Hunter S. Thompson, originated in the early 1960s, when Esquire editor Harold Hayes began recruiting novelists on reporting assignments. Dwight Macdonald, veteran of Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and foundational “gentile cousin” of the New York Intellectuals derided this “bastard form” in the August 26, 1965 issue of The New York Review of Books as “parajournalism,” tracing its ancestry back to Daniel DeFoe’s counterfactual Journal of the Plague Year through “the gossip columnists, sob sisters, fashion writers, and Hollywood reporters of this century.” The overlap between the “serious” journalism of Macdonald’s cohort and the gonzo frivolity of the glossy mags was substantial, and Baldwin’s anticipation of the trend suggests Macdonald’s binary to be false, a localized symptom of broader generational conflict. In The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting, Len Gutkind expresses surprise at the failure of Wolfe and E. W. Johnson to select any black or more than two female writers for their 1973 New Journalism anthology, Baldwin, especially; rereading “Notes of a Native Son,” he speculates that Baldwin’s essays “were just too damn good.” Their presence, “would show, alongside the many writers Wolfe included in that collection, what was missing in the new journalism.”
Hayes first reached out to Baldwin in 1959, inviting him to profile Ingmar Bergman and Charlie Chaplin. By then, Baldwin had escaped the ghetto of book reviewing by means of implicating his own subjectivity and experience in the task. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Many Thousands Gone” slayed his youthful idols, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Wright (to the latter’s confused wrath), and in “Faulkner and Desegration” (for Partisan Review) and “Sermons and Blues” (for the Times Book Review), Baldwin did not hesitate to kneecap the giants of American modernism: in 1962, Langston Hughes, who had favorably reviewed Notes for the Times in 1958, sent Baldwin a postcard on the morning that his hatchet job of the eminence’s Selected Poems appeared in the same publication: “Hey, Jimmy / Ain’t you heard? / RACE AND ART / Are far apart.” In “The Harlem Ghetto” and “Equal in Paris” (for Commentary), “Journey to Atlanta” (for The New Leader), “The Negro in Paris” (republished as “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown,” for The Reporter, after Harper’s passed on the manuscript), “Me and My House…” and “The Hard Kind of Courage” (a.k.a. “Notes of a Native Son” and “A Fly in the Buttermilk”), and “Stranger in the Village” (for Harper’s), and “Princes and Powers” (for Encounter, which, like The Paris Review, received funds from the CIA), he proved himself a singularly adept observer of and commentator on race relations back home and abroad. When Baldwin first returned to the States in 1957, it was to report on school integration for Partisan Review, Mademoiselle, and Harper’s, for which he also profiled King, setting up shop in Arkansas, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida newsrooms as a legman on the frontlines. Though Hayes eagerly courted Baldwin’s reflections on race, publishing “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” in a July 1960 issue on New York and “Color” in December 1962, he was one of very few editors pushing Baldwin to shake the limitations of a “Negro writer”: in 1960, Baldwin was chosen to participate in an Esquire symposium on “Writing in America Today” with Roth and John Cheever, and “The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman” (retitled “The Northern Protestant”), his evisceration of sometime buddy Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” and “The New Lost Generation” showcase the writer less as the angry black man that the white liberal media establishment had been grooming him to be, but a starstruck fan, a hurt friend, a New Yorker in exile.
Yet even Hayes could not help but play both sides. In August 1964, Esquire published a disparaging profile of Baldwin by Marvin Elkoff, “Everybody Knows His Name,” which offended Baldwin so deeply that he threatened to sue. Hayes, who “did not like polemics,” Carol Polsgrove writes in It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, but Didn’t We Have Fun?, was distressed by The Fire Next Time, which led him to speak of “a virulent strain in some of Baldwin’s recent work”:
The very special enemy of the Negro, argues Baldwin, is the white liberal, one who knows better but does nothing. Out of this argument a strange phenomenon has ensued: a whole body of readers, most of them white liberals, pleading for Baldwin to show them ever more clearly how terrible they are. As a matter of fact, many of us believe the so-called white liberal constitutes the better part of Baldwin’s audience. Baldwin’s proposition here, I respectfully submit, is dead wrong. . . . The white liberal who does not attend the picket line or sit-down in front of the attorney general’s office goes to the polls nevertheless, articulates his commitment by voicing his opinion as well as his vote, and asserts in a thousand ways within this densely populated nation his influence. Without him, there truly would be blood in the streets.
There was also the matter of money. In April 1961, Hayes responded to a letter from Mills requesting an increase in his client’s rate. Denying the request, Hayes detailed Baldwin’s history of payment for the four pieces published to date:
For the first (Ingmar Bergman), $600 plus $200 expenses. Second (Letter from Harlem), $600 plus $150 bonus — total $750. Third (Mailer), $850 plus $150 bonus, for a total of $1,000. Fourth (The Expatriates), $850. Our position is that we started Jim at a $600 article rate, and in the course of his doing four pieces, we’ve raised him to $850. Along the way he has received bonuses for two of these four pieces (and these bonuses, I might add, were given without the nudging of an agent). When you consider our article rates–$250 to $1,000, this seems to be a pretty fair shake (considerably better, in fact, than most of our writers get).
After hectoring Mills for contacting him in the first place (“It is not my practice to discuss assignments, or rates, with agents”), Hayes firmly concludes that Baldwin’s rate will stay at $850 per article. Only two years later, Hayes denied Tom Morgan a raise from $1,350 to $1,500: “You know the only person at Esquire who gets $1,500 is Norman Mailer.” Upon Morgan’s objection that Mailer had only written five pieces for the magazine to his own forty, Hayes said, “I know Tom, but it wouldn’t be right. Norman Mailer is going to win the Nobel Prize.” Declining Hayes’s final offer of $1,450, Morgan never wrote for the magazine again. For his part, Baldwin would contribute three final pieces: “How Can We Get the Black People to Cool It?” in July 1968, “Sweet Lorraine” in November 1969, and “Dark Days” in October 1980, by which point Don Erickson had replaced Hayes as editor. An undated offer from fiction editor Rust Hills of $1,500 per story appears to have been left on the table; in 1961, Mills told Ebony that his client was expected to make $20,000 — three and a half times the median household income.
Between the murders of Medgar Evars in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and King in 1968, which haunted his late nonfiction, Baldwin’s stardom, commitment to the cause of black liberation, and more personal distractions from his passion — the novels — led him to accept fewer magazine assignments, though he could still attract decent rates: $4000 from Playboy for “Words of a Native Son” in December 1964, $1000 from Ebony for “The White Man’s Guilt” in August 1965, and a $5000 commission from Erickson to write about Blaxploitation cinema in June 1974, which mutated into his 1976 jeremiad against racism in Hollywood, The Devil Finds Work, excerpts of which Esquire ultimately nixed. The financial urgency behind constant pleas for loans (“I haven’t got any cash,” he wrote to friend Mary Painter in January 1954) that caused his agent, Helen Strauss, to implore him in 1955 “to get whatever magazine stuff you’ve planned out of the way as soon as possible, so you’ll have some finances. . . . Right now the magazines all want pieces from you, and this would be a good way to get your name in print again; and last, but not least, a way for you to live so that you could get on to another novel,” had all but disappeared: by the mid-1960s, Baldwin had made it, earning up to $500 per speaking engagement (internal documents of the Congress of Racial Equality show that his speeches raised the organization in excess of $20,000), and purchasing a rowhouse at 137 West 71st Street as a residence for his family. In 1971, he moved into “Chez Baldwin,” in Saint-Paul de Vence, between the Alps and the Côte d’Azur, and in 1985, his attorney, Elliot Taubman, estimated his income for the year at somewhere between $250,000 and $400,000 ($726,000-$1.2 million today). Returned advances for undelivered manuscripts, taxes owed, and legal complications notwithstanding, Baldwin’s career was a lucrative one, due in no small part to his success as a freelance journalist, even if it was the books, with their options, rights, and royalties, that brought in the big bucks.
Even as the money rolled in, the reviews were not good. As early as 1963, Baldwin’s fellow travelers were already dismissing him as a “show-biz moralist”: in Dissent, Howe vindicated Wright against Baldwin’s attacks, and in the New York Review, Robert Brustein compared Baldwin to “a punchy and pugnacious drunk awakening from a boozy doze during a stag movie to introduce his garrulous, irrelevant, and by now predictable comments on how to live, how to love, and how to build Jerusalem,” deducing that “he is now part and parcel of the very things he is criticizing.” In 1973, Time killed a Henry Louis Gates Jr. interview with their former cover model, declaring the subject “passé,” and three years later, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s lukewarm Times review of The Devil Finds Work began, “So James Baldwin is still here, still pursuing us, a ghost of 60’s past. Even though he long ago became unfashionable, long ago wore out his welcome even in the black revolution (because he dared to believe that whites and blacks could love each other despite everything), he goes on jumping up and down and pointing like the man in the old Philadelphia Inquirer ads.” Such casually reactionary disdain was doubtless a sign of the times, but if Baldwin is now considered one of the greatest writers in English of the twentieth century, that reputation rests on what Hilton Als has called the “high-faggoty style” of his essays, which once caused Stein to exclaim, “Why this man writes like a 19th century English don; he’s so damn precise about his huge emotions.” With the possible exception of If Beale Street Could Talk, in 1974, not one of his novels after Giovanni’s Room satisfied his most generous critics: in the Times, Goodman judged Another Country “mediocre” and “unworthy of the author’s lovely abilities,” while Mario Puzo, also in the Times, resigned himself to an discomfiting echo of “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” writing of 1968’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (unharmoniously edited by E. L. Doctorow),
It becomes clearer with each book he publishes that Baldwin’s reputation is justified by his essays rather than his fiction. It may be that he is not a true or “born” novelist. But it must be said that his essays are as well written as any in our language; in them his thought and its utterance are nothing less than majestical. He has, also, the virtues of passion, serious intelligence and compassionate understanding of his fellow man. Yet it would seem that such gifts, enough for critics and moralists and other saintly figures, are not enough to insure the writing of good fiction. Novelists are born sinners and their salvation does not come so easily, and certainly the last role the artist should play is that of the prosecutor, the creator of a propaganda novel. A propaganda novel may be socially valuable (Grapes of Wrath, Gentlemen’s Agreement), but it is not art.
Baldwin’s black critics were no gentler, though Pinckney regrets using his assessment of Just Above My Head for the New York Review to work out his Oedipal hang-ups almost as much as he regrets defending his arguments to Baldwin in person years later. “I had been to two black newspapers,” Baldwin writes of his salad days, “and had simply been laughed out of the office: I was a shoeshine boy who had never been to college,” and with the exception of a handful of contributions to Ebony, Essence, The Negro Digest, Freedomways, The Black Scholar, and two columns on theatre for the shortlived Urbanite, Baldwin never maintained a fertile relationship with the black press (a 1972 attempt by Toni Morrison, an enterprising editor at Random House but not yet a close friend, to poach him from Dial, was unsuccessful). In 1967, he and Ossie Davis resigned from the advisory board of Liberator following the publication of Eddie Ellis’s “Semitism in the Black Ghetto,” which took up in more vitriolic tones the argument Baldwin had made nearly two decades earlier in “The Harlem Ghetto.” In response, he submitted one of his most controversial essays, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” to the Times Magazine, where Levitas’ son, Mitchel, was his editor. The headline seems designed to elicit bad-faith misreadings, and although Baldwin sided with the American Jewish Committee in the Liberator affair, his affinities for the anti-imperialist message of Black Power extended to criticism of Israel, which he himself indulged in a 1979 essay for The Nation, “Open Letter to the Born Again,” further distancing him from the Zionist solidarities of legacy media.
At the same time, even as Baldwin defended Stokely Carmichael, in The Guardian, and Angela Davis, in the New York Review, Harold Cruse targeted the “tormented inconsistency” of Baldwin, “who is certainly not even remotely middle-class,” in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and Eldridge Cleaver, in Soul on Ice, found in Baldwin’s work “the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of whites that one can find in the writings of any black American writer of note in our time.” The virulent homophobia of Cleaver’s ad hominem parallels the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s reluctance to foreground Baldwin (snubbed at the 1963 March on Washington, he attended some distance from the podium) on the grounds of his uncloseted sexuality, which led some in Kennedy circles to refer to him as “Martin Luther Queen”; neither Podhoretz, who came to advocate for, as Ronnie Grinberg puts it, “what the New Right defined as ‘family values’ issues,” nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose thousand-page file on Baldwin identifies him as a “pervert,” were above this hateful name-calling. Magnanimously, Baldwin went on to praise Soul on Ice for the New York Review; although Barbara Epstein returned the edited manuscript with light, discursive queries and a “grateful” memo for a “terrific” piece, the essay was never published — ironically, Soul on Ice was reviewed alongside Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, in the December 19, 1968 issue by Jack Richardson instead.
Although, as Louis Menand argues, in The Free World, “identity was the obsession of Baldwin’s life,” in the same way that he resisted being cast as a “Negro writer,” those intent on characterizing him as “gay” or “queer” were often met with pushback. Baldwin had loved both men and women, and while this fluidity was open early enough to appear as subtext in Go Tell It on a Mountain and as subject in a 1954 New Leader review of André Gide’s Madeleine, it was not until a late essay, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” appeared in the January 1985 issue of Playboy (anthologized as “Here Be Dragons”), that Baldwin addressed the matter head-on. Soon after Hugh Hefner hired him as Playboy’s first black editor, Walter Lowe Jr., made contact with Baldwin, and in December 1981 published “The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” an investigation into the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979–1981, for which an African American, Wayne Williams, was suspected and, in 1982, convicted, on scant evidence, for two of them. Once again, the article originated as an assignment for The New Yorker, on “the New South,” but when Baldwin expanded it into a book, Doubleday, which had acquired Baldwin’s contracts after Dial dissolved in 1985, turned down the manuscript, and it was purchased by Holt, Rinehart & Winston for $30,000 — the equivalent of what Publisher’s Weekly would call, with feigned enthusiasm, “a very nice deal.” Disappointments aside, Baldwin used his platform in the leading purveyor of female objectification to disabuse readers of their own macho delusions, interrupting centerfolds with a harsh indictment of Americans’ tragic lack of self-knowledge exactly as he had done within the pages of liberal consensus rags for nearly forty years. These essays, Joseph Vogel contends, offer “some of the clearest evidence against the conventional wisdom that the author was in decline and no longer producing original work in the 1980s.” No longer hurting for cash, Baldwin was grateful to accept £80 from New Edinburgh Review (unlike William S. Burroughs, who didn’t bother to deposit his fee) for “Of the Sorrow Songs” in 1979, likely aware that, beyond affording him the price of the ticket, magazines had granted him a perch from which to ruffle feathers, his life’s work more than any single review, essay, story, speech, novel, poem, or play can lay claim.
For Esquire, Baldwin had lambasted Mailer’s mayoral aspirations, sighing: “It’s not your job. . . . I do not think, if one is a writer, that one escapes it by trying to become something else. One does not become something else: one becomes nothing.” Colm Tóibín admits that, like Mailer, there were times when the “literary personality . . . took on too much; their interest in a subject was sometimes not equaled by their account of it.” There were times, too, Tóibín writes, “when Baldwin appeared like a method actor playing out the part of thoughtfulness, working out as the camera rolled how a man considering things carefully might appear,” his rhetorical adoption of we to articulate the beliefs of white liberals causing black readers to question his allegiance just as his deployment of a collective I triggered adversaries to distrust the validity of his testimony. Though his journalism was not what he wished to be celebrated, it was on deadline, “when there was a great deal at stake,” that Baldwin’s intelligence and his prose style found their match: “personal and passionate and angry . . . wise, analytical, knowing, clued-in and ironic, relishing nuance, ambiguity, and paradox.”
Black essayists since, Pinckney and Als among them, have not ceased to carry on Baldwin’s project in the same venues that made him a star, but few have managed to pointedly upset — and thus resonate with — the American psyche within their lifetimes to the degree that he did. Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose work has sustained the most overt conversation with Baldwin’s, has enjoyed comparable success, acclaim, and ire, and one wonders if his recent turn to the question of Palestine, in The Message, will in time overcome the barrage of resistance that Baldwin, could only anticipate. The radical tradition of which Baldwin was always on the fringes continues to hold space within the remaining vestiges of academic and leftist publishing now at the foreground of authoritarian contempt, but not since Morrison died in 2019 has such a shrewd and eloquent critic of America’s obsession with whiteness captured the attention of those most in need of what they have to say.
This, of course, has much less to do with the state of African American writing, which thrives against considerable odds, than that of writing in general. The prospects for a principled essayist could hardly be more dire, subjected as they are to professionalization, complacency, cynicism, homogenization, marginalization, and censorship — all evils that Baldwin built a career haranguing against. To a cohort of black American expatriates crowded into Delaney’s Paris studio in 1970, Baldwin said, gesturing at his mentor, “He can do some things that you can’t do. You can do some things that he can’t do. I can do some things that neither of you can do. I know I can’t drive a truck, and I can’t rob a bank, and I can’t count, and I can’t lead a movement. But I can fuck up your mind.” Cultivated at the peak of a media landscape teetering toward its fall, Baldwin’s capacity to mindfuck readers into self-understanding justifies the preservation, veneration, and kneejerk refutation of his work, but there was only so much that he could do on his own. Without a robust vanguard of publishers, editors, writers, and readers fighting to persist with his long overdue critique, the fire will go out before it can spread.