Editing James Baldwin (section)

==Early life==
===Birth and family===
Baldwin was born as '''James Arthur Jones''' to Emma Berdis Jones on August 2, 1924, at [[Harlem Hospital]] in [[New York City]].<ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Als |first1=Hilton |title=The Enemy Within |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/02/16/the-enemy-within-hilton-als |magazine=The New Yorker |access-date=December 16, 2022 |date=February 9, 1998}}</ref> Born on [[Deal Island, Maryland]], in 1903,{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|p=122}} Emma Jones was one of many who fled [[Racial segregation in the United States|racial segregation and discrimination]] in the [[Southern United States|South]] during the [[Great Migration (African American)|Great Migration]]. She arrived in [[Harlem, New York]], when she was 19 years old.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=3}} Baldwin was born out of wedlock there. Jones never revealed to him who his biological father was.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=3}}

Jones originally undertook to care for her son as a single mother.{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=243–244}} However, in 1927, Jones married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=4}} David Baldwin was born in [[Bunkie, Louisiana]], and preached in [[New Orleans]], but left the [[Southern United States|South]] for Harlem in 1919.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=4}}{{efn|In his early writing, Baldwin said his father left the South because he reviled the crude [[vaudeville]] culture in New Orleans and found it difficult to express his inner strivings. However, Baldwin later said his father departed because "lynching had become a national sport."{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=4}}}} How David and Emma met is uncertain, but in James Baldwin's semi-autobiographical ''[[Go Tell It on the Mountain (novel)|Go Tell It on the Mountain]]'', the characters based on the two are introduced by the man's sister.{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|p=248}} Emma Baldwin and David Baldwin had eight children in sixteen years—George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr. (named for James's stepfather and deceased half-brother), Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Paula.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=20}} James took his stepfather's last name.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=3}} James rarely wrote or spoke of his mother. When he did, he made it clear that he admired and loved her, often through reference to her loving smile.{{sfn|Leeming|1994}}{{rp|20}} James moved several times while young but always within Harlem.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|pp=5–6}} At the time, Harlem was still a mixed-race area of the city in the incipient days of the [[Great Migration (African American)|Great Migration]].{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=6}}

James Baldwin did not know exactly how old his stepfather was, but it is clear that he was much older than Emma; indeed, he may have been born before the [[Emancipation Proclamation|Emancipation]] in 1863.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=5}} David's mother, Barbara, was born enslaved and lived with the Baldwins in New York before her death when James was seven years old.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=5}} David also had a light-skinned half-brother fathered by his mother's erstwhile enslaver{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=5}} and a sister named Barbara, whom James and others in the family called "Taunty".<ref>{{harvnb|Campbell|2021|p=19}}; {{harvnb|Leeming|1994|p=23}}</ref> David's father was born a slave.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=3}} David had been married earlier and had a daughter, who was as old as Emma and at least two sons―David, who died while in jail, and Sam, who was eight years James's senior. Sam lived with the Baldwins for a time and once saved James from drowning.{{sfn|Leeming|1994}}{{rp|7}}{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=5}}

James Baldwin referred to his stepfather simply as "father" throughout his life,{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=4}} but David Sr. and James had an extremely difficult relationship and nearly resorted to physical fights on several occasions.{{sfn|Leeming|1994}}{{rp|18}}{{efn|Baldwin learned that he was not his father's biological son through overhearing a comment to that effect during one of his parents' conversations late in 1940.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=41}} He tearfully recounted this fact to [[Emile Capouya]], with whom he went to school.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=41}}}} "They fought because James read books, because he liked movies, because he had white friends", all of which, David Baldwin thought, threatened James's "salvation".{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=18}} According to one biographer, David Baldwin also hated [[white people]] and "his devotion to [[God]] was mixed with a hope that God would take revenge on them for him."{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=8}}{{efn|It is in describing his father's searing hatred of white people that comes one of Baldwin's most noted quotes: "Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=52}}}} During the 1920s and 1930s, David worked at a soft-drink bottling factory,{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=6}} although he was eventually laid off from the job. As his anger and hatred eventually tainted his sermons, he was less in demand as a preacher. David sometimes took out his anger on his family and the children were afraid of him, though this was to some degree balanced by the love lavished on them by their mother.{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=351–356}}

David Baldwin grew paranoid near the end of his life.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=7}} He was committed to a mental asylum in 1943 and died of tuberculosis on July 29 of that year, the same day Emma had their last child, Paula.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=19, 51}} James, at his mother's urging, visited his dying stepfather the day before{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=457–458}} and came to something of a posthumous reconciliation with him in his essay "Notes of a Native Son". In the essay, he wrote: "in his outrageously demanding and protective way, he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced like him."{{sfn|Kenan 1994|pp=27–28}} David Baldwin's funeral was held on James's 19th birthday, around the same time that the [[Harlem riot of 1943|Harlem riot]] began.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=52}}
[[File:JamesBaldwin1964.jpg|left|thumb|Baldwin in Los Angeles, 1964]]
As the oldest child, James Baldwin worked part-time from an early age to help support his family. He was molded not only by the difficult relationships in his household but also by the impacts of the poverty and discrimination he saw all around him. As he grew up, friends he sat next to in church turned to drugs, crime, or prostitution. In what biographer Anna Malaika Tubbs found to be a commentary on not only his own life but also the entire Black experience in America, Baldwin wrote: "I never had a childhood... I did not have any human identity... I was born dead."{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=512–514}}

===Education and preaching===
Baldwin wrote comparatively little about events at school.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=14}} At five years of age, he was enrolled at Public School 24 (P.S. 24) on 128th Street in Harlem.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=14}} The principal of the school was [[Elise Johnson McDougald|Gertrude E. Ayer]], the first Black principal in the city. She and some of Baldwin's teachers recognized his brilliance early on{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|p=357}} and encouraged his research and writing pursuits.<ref name="Campbell14Leeming2324">{{harvnb|Campbell|2021|p=14}}; {{harvnb|Leeming|1994|pp=23–24}}</ref> Ayer stated that Baldwin derived his writing talent from his mother, whose notes to school were greatly admired by the teachers, and that her son also learned to write like an angel, albeit an avenging one.{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=519–520}} By fifth grade, not yet a teenager, Baldwin had read some of [[Fyodor Dostoyevsky]]'s works, [[Harriet Beecher Stowe]]'s ''[[Uncle Tom's Cabin]]'', and [[Charles Dickens]]' ''[[A Tale of Two Cities]]'' (which gave him a lifelong interest in the work of Dickens).{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=24}}{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=8}} Baldwin wrote a song that earned praise from [[New York Mayor]] [[Fiorello La Guardia]] in a letter that La Guardia sent to him.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=24}} Baldwin also won a prize for a short story that was published in a church newspaper.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=24}} His teachers recommended that he go to a public library on 135th Street in Harlem, a place that became his sanctuary. Baldwin would request on his deathbed that his papers and effects be deposited there.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=24}}

It was at P.S. 24 that Baldwin met Orilla "Bill" Miller, a young white schoolteacher from the Midwest whom Baldwin named as one of the reasons that he "never really managed to hate white people".{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=25}}{{efn|It was from Bill Miller, her sister Henrietta, and Miller's husband Evan Winfield that the young Baldwin started to suspect that "white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=27}} Miller's openness did not have a similar effect on Baldwin's father.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=16}} Emma Baldwin was pleased with Miller's interest in her son, but David agreed only reluctantly—not daring to refuse the invitation of a white woman, in Baldwin's later estimation, a subservience that Baldwin came to despise.<ref>{{harvnb|Leeming|1994|p=16}}; {{harvnb|Campbell|2021|p=8}}</ref>}} Among other outings, Miller took Baldwin to see an all-Black rendition of [[Orson Welles]]'s take on ''[[Voodoo Macbeth|Macbeth]]'' at the [[Lafayette Theatre (Harlem)|Lafayette Theatre]], from which flowed Baldwin's lifelong desire to succeed as a [[playwright]].{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=28}}{{efn|As Baldwin's biographer and friend David Leeming tells it: "Like [[Henry James]], the writer he most admired, [Baldwin] would have given up almost anything for sustained success as a playwright."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=28}} Indeed, the last writing Baldwin did before his death was on a play called ''The Welcome Table''.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=28}}}} David was reluctant to let his stepson go to the theatre, because he saw the stage as sinful and was suspicious of Miller. However, Baldwin's mother insisted, reminding his father of the importance of education.{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=358–359}} Miller later directed the first play that Baldwin ever wrote.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=26}}

After P.S. 24, Baldwin entered Harlem's Frederick Douglass Junior High School.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=14}}{{efn|Baldwin's biographers give different years for his entry into Frederick Douglass Junior High School: 1935 and 1936.<ref>{{harvnb|Leeming|1994|p=32}}; {{harvnb|Campbell|2021|p=14}}</ref>}} There, Baldwin met two important influences.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=32}} The first was Herman W. "Bill" Porter, a Black Harvard graduate.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=33}} Porter was the faculty advisor to the school's newspaper, the ''Douglass Pilot'', of which Baldwin would become the editor.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=14}} Porter took Baldwin to the library on 42nd Street to research a piece that would turn into Baldwin's first published essay titled "Harlem—Then and Now", which appeared in the autumn 1937 issue of the ''Douglass Pilot''.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|pp=14–15}} The second of these influences from his time at Frederick Douglass Junior High School was [[Countee Cullen]], the renowned poet of the [[Harlem Renaissance]].{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=32–33}} Cullen taught French and was a literary advisor in the English department.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=14}} Baldwin later remarked that he "adored" Cullen's poetry, and his dream to live in France was sparked by Cullen's early impression on him.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=33}} Baldwin graduated from Frederick Douglass Junior High in 1938.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=33}}{{efn|In the summer following his graduation from Frederick Douglass Junior High, the 13-year-old Baldwin experienced what he would call his "violation": he was running an errand for his mother when a tall man in his mid-30s lured him onto the second floor of a store, where the man touched Baldwin sexually. Alarmed by a noise, the man gave Baldwin money and disappeared. Baldwin ran home and threw the money out of his bathroom window.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=34}} Baldwin named this as his first confrontation with homosexuality, an experience he said both scared and aroused him.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=34}}}}

In 1938, Baldwin applied to and was accepted at [[De Witt Clinton High School]] in [[the Bronx]], a predominantly [[White Americans|white]] and [[Jewish Americans|Jewish]] school, where he matriculated that fall.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=37}} He worked on the school's magazine, the ''Magpie'' with [[Richard Avedon]], who went on to become a noted photographer, and [[Emile Capouya]] and [[Sol Stein]], who would both become renowned publishers.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=37}} Baldwin did interviews and editing at the magazine and published a number of poems and other writing.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|pp=15–20}} He completed his high school diploma at De Witt Clinton in 1941.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=25}} Baldwin's yearbook listed his career ambition as "novelist-playwright", and his motto in the yearbook was: "Fame is the spur and—ouch!"{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=25}}

Uncomfortable with his discovery during his high school years that he was attracted to men rather than women, Baldwin sought refuge in religion.{{sfn|Kenan 1994|pp=34–37}} He joined the now-demolished Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church on [[Lenox Avenue]] in 1937. He then followed Mount Calvary's preacher, Bishop Rose Artemis Horn (who was affectionately known as Mother Horn) when she left to preach at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly.<ref>{{harvnb|Leeming|1994|pp=37–38}}; {{harvnb|Campbell|2021|p=10}}</ref> At the age of 14, "Brother Baldwin", as he was called, first took to Fireside's altar, and it was at Fireside Pentecostal, during his mostly extemporaneous sermons, that Baldwin "learned that he had authority as a speaker and could do things with a crowd."{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=10}} He delivered his final sermon at Fireside Pentecostal in 1941.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=10}} Baldwin wrote in the essay "Down at the Cross" that the church "was a mask for self-hatred and despair&nbsp;... salvation stopped at the church door".{{sfn|Kenan 1994|p=41}} He recalled a rare conversation with David Baldwin "in which they had really spoken to one another", during which his stepfather asked: "You'd rather write than preach, wouldn't you?"{{sfn|Kenan 1994|p=41}}

===Later years in New York===
Baldwin left school in 1941 in order to earn money to help support his family. He secured a job helping to build a United States Army depot in New Jersey.{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|p=522}} In the middle of 1942, Emile Capouya helped Baldwin get a job laying tracks for the military in [[Belle Mead, New Jersey]].{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=49}} The two lived in [[Rocky Hill, New Jersey|Rocky Hill]] and commuted to Belle Mead.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=49}} In Belle Mead, Baldwin experienced prejudice that deeply frustrated and angered him and that he cited as the partial cause of his later emigration out of America.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=48–49}} Baldwin's fellow white workmen, who mostly came from [[American South|the South]], derided him for what they saw as his "uppity" ways, his sharp, ironic wit and his lack of "respect".{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=49}}

In an incident that Baldwin described in his essay "Notes of a Native Son", he went to a restaurant in Princeton called the Balt where, after a long wait, Baldwin was told that "colored boys" were not served there.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=49}} Then, on his last night in New Jersey, in another incident also memorialized in "Notes of a Native Son", Baldwin and a friend went to a diner after a movie, only to be told that Black people were not served there.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=50}} Infuriated, he went to another restaurant, expecting to be denied service once again.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=50}} When that denial of service came, humiliation and rage overcame Baldwin and he hurled the nearest object at hand—a water mug—at the waitress, missing her and shattering the mirror behind her.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=51}} Baldwin and his friend narrowly escaped.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=51}}

During these years, Baldwin was torn between his desire to write and his need to provide for his family. He took a succession of menial jobs and feared that he was becoming like his stepfather, who had been unable to provide properly for his family.{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=523–524}} Fired from the track-laying job, Baldwin returned to Harlem in June 1943 to live with his family after taking a meat-packing job.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=51}} He lost the meat-packing job too, after falling asleep at the plant.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=52}} He became listless and unstable, drifting from one odd job to the next.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=52–53}} Baldwin drank heavily and endured the first of his [[nervous breakdown]]s.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=53}}

[[Beauford Delaney]] helped Baldwin cast off his melancholy.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=53}} During the year before he left De Witt Clinton, and at Capouya's urging, Baldwin had met Delaney, a [[modernist painter]], in [[Greenwich Village]].{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=43}} Delaney would become Baldwin's long-time friend and mentor, and helped demonstrate to Baldwin that a Black man could make his living in art.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=43}} Moreover, when [[World War II]] bore down on [[Military history of the United States during World War II|the United States]] during the winter after Baldwin left De Witt Clinton, the Harlem that Baldwin knew was atrophying—no longer the bastion of a [[Harlem Renaissance|Renaissance]], the community grew more economically isolated, and he considered his prospects there to be bleak.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=48}} This led him to move to Greenwich Village, a place that had fascinated him since at least the age of 15.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=48}}

Baldwin lived in several locations in Greenwich Village, the first being with Delaney, then with a scattering of other friends.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=53–54}} He took a job at the Calypso Restaurant, an unsegregated eatery at which many prominent Black people dined. At the Calypso, Baldwin worked under Trinidadian restaurateur [[Connie Williams (Trinidadian)|Connie Williams]]. During this time, Baldwin continued to explore his sexuality, coming out to Capouya and another friend, and to frequent Calypso guest, [[Stan Weir (academic)|Stan Weir]].{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=55}} Baldwin also had numerous one-night stands with various men, and several relationships with women.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=55}} His major love during his Village years was an ostensibly straight Black man named Eugene Worth.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=56}} Worth introduced Baldwin to the [[Young People's Socialist League (1907)|Young People's Socialist League]] and Baldwin became a [[Trotskyist]] for a brief period.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=56}} Baldwin never expressed his desire for Worth, and Worth died by [[suicide]] after jumping from the [[George Washington Bridge]] in 1946.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=56}}{{efn|Eugene Worth's story would give form to the character Rufus in ''[[Another Country (novel)|Another Country]]''.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=56}}}} In 1944, Baldwin met [[Marlon Brando]], to whom he was also attracted, at a theater class at [[The New School]].{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=56}} The two became fast friends, a friendship that endured through the Civil Rights Movement and long after.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=56}} In 1945, Baldwin started a literary magazine called ''The Generation'' with [[Claire Burch]], who was married to Brad Burch, Baldwin's classmate from De Witt Clinton.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=58}} Baldwin's relationship with the Burches soured in the 1950s but was resurrected towards the end of his life.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=58-59}}

Near the end of 1945, Baldwin met [[Richard Wright (author)|Richard Wright]], who had published the novel ''[[Native Son]]'' several years earlier.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|pp=23, 31}} Baldwin's main objective for that initial meeting was to interest Wright in an early manuscript of what would later become ''[[Go Tell It on the Mountain (novel)|Go Tell It On The Mountain]]'', but that was at the time titled "Crying Holy".{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=32}} Wright liked the manuscript and encouraged his editors to consider Baldwin's work, but an initial $500 advance from [[Harper & Brothers]] was dissipated with no book to show for the money, and Harper eventually declined to publish the book at all.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=59}} Nonetheless, Baldwin regularly sent letters to Wright in the subsequent years and would reunite with Wright in [[Paris]], France, in 1948 (though their relationship took a turn for the worse soon after the Paris reunion).{{sfn|Campbell|2021|pp=32–34}}

During his Village years, Baldwin made a number of connections in New York's liberal literary establishment, primarily through Worth: [[Sol Levitas]] at ''[[The New Leader]]'' magazine, [[Randall Jarrell]] at ''[[The Nation]]'', [[Elliot Cohen]] and [[Robert Warshow]] at ''[[Commentary Magazine|Commentary]]'', and [[Philip Rahv]] at ''[[Partisan Review]]''.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=60}} Baldwin wrote many reviews for ''The New Leader'', but was published for the first time in ''The Nation'' in a 1947 review of [[Maxim Gorki]]'s ''Best Short Stories''.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=60}} Only one of Baldwin's reviews from this era made it into his later essay collection ''[[The Price of the Ticket]]'': a sharply ironic assay of [[Ross Lockridge]]'s ''Raintree Countree'' that Baldwin wrote for ''The New Leader''.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=60}} Baldwin's first essay, "The Harlem Ghetto", was published a year later in ''Commentary'' and explored anti-Semitism among Black Americans.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=60}} His conclusion was that Harlem was a parody of white America, with white American anti-Semitism included.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=60}} Jewish people were also the main group of white people that Black Harlem dwellers met, so Jews became a kind of [[synecdoche]] for all that the Black people in Harlem thought of white people.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=60–61}} Baldwin published his second essay in ''The New Leader'', riding a mild wave of excitement over "Harlem Ghetto": in "Journey to Atlanta", Baldwin uses the diary recollections of his younger brother David, who had gone to [[Atlanta]], [[Georgia (U.S. state)|Georgia]], as part of a singing group, to unleash a lashing of irony and scorn on the South, white radicals, and ideology itself.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=61}} This essay, too, was well received.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=44}}

Baldwin tried to write another novel, ''Ignorant Armies'', plotted in the vein of ''Native Son'' with a focus on a scandalous murder, but no final product materialised.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=62}} Baldwin spent two months during the summer of 1948 at Shanks Village, a writer's colony in [[Woodstock, New York]]. He then published his first work of fiction, a short story called "Previous Condition", in the October 1948 issue of ''Commentary'' magazine, about a 20-something Black man who is evicted from his apartment—the apartment being a metaphor for white society.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=63}}