The Cross of Redemption

"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."

James Baldwin Edited with an Introduction by Randall Kenan

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