Editing James Baldwin (section)

==== ''Notes of a Native Son'' (1955) ====
{{main|Notes of a Native Son}}
Baldwin's friend from high school, Sol Stein, encouraged Baldwin to publish an essay collection reflecting on his work thus far.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=105}} Originally, Baldwin was reluctant, saying he was "too young to publish my memoirs."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=105}} but he nevertheless produced a collection, ''Notes of a Native Son,'' that was published in 1955.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=105}} The book contained practically all of the major themes that run through his work: searching for self when racial myths cloud reality; accepting an inheritance ("the conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American"); claiming a birthright ("my birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever"); the artist's loneliness; love's urgency.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=105–106}} All the essays in ''Notes'' were published between 1948 and 1955 in ''Commentary'', ''The New Leader'', ''Partisan Review'', ''The Reporter'', and ''Harper's Magazine''.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=106}} The essays rely on autobiographical detail to convey Baldwin's arguments, as all of Baldwin's work does.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=106}} ''Notes'' was Baldwin's first introduction to many white Americans and it became their reference point for his work: Baldwin was often asked: "Why don't you write more essays like the ones in ''Notes of a Native Son''?"{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=106}} The collection's title alludes to both Richard Wright's ''Native Son'' and the work of one of Baldwin's favorite writers, [[Henry James]]'s ''[[Notes of a Son and Brother]]''.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=107}}

''Notes of a Native Son'' is divided into three parts: the first part deals with Black identity as artist and human; the second part addresses Black life in America, including what is sometimes considered Baldwin's best essay, the titular "Notes of a Native Son"; the final part takes the expatriate's perspective, looking at American society from beyond its shores.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=108}} Part One of ''Notes'' features "Everybody's Protest Novel" and "Many Thousands Gone", along with "Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough", a 1955 review of ''[[Carmen Jones (film)|Carmen Jones]]'' written for ''Commentary'', in which Baldwin at once extols the sight of an all-Black cast on the [[silver screen]] and laments the film's myths about Black sexuality.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=107–108}} Part Two reprints "The Harlem Ghetto" and "Journey to Atlanta" as prefaces for "Notes of a Native Son". In "Notes of a Native Son", Baldwin attempts to come to terms with his racial and filial inheritances.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=109}} Part Three contains "Equal in Paris", "Stranger in the Village", "Encounter on the Seine", and "A Question of Identity". Writing from the expatriate's perspective, Part Three is the sector of Baldwin's corpus that most closely mirrors Henry James's methods: hewing out of one's distance and detachment from the homeland a coherent idea of what it means to be American.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=109}}{{efn|This is particularly true of "A Question of Identity". Indeed, Baldwin reread ''[[The Ambassadors]]'' around the same time he was writing "A Question of Identity" and the two works share some thematic congeniality.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=109}}}}

Throughout ''Notes'', when Baldwin is not speaking in [[first-person narrative|first-person]], Baldwin takes the view of white Americans. For example, in "The Harlem Ghetto", Baldwin writes: "what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by the myths we perpetuate about him."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=107}} This earned some quantity of scorn from reviewers: in a review for ''[[The New York Times Book Review]]'', [[Langston Hughes]] lamented that "Baldwin's viewpoints are half American, half Afro-American, incompletely fused."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=107}} Others were nonplussed by the handholding of white audiences, which Baldwin himself would criticize in later works.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=107}} Nonetheless, most acutely in this stage in his career, Baldwin wanted to escape the rigid categories of protest literature and he viewed adopting a white point-of-view as a good method of doing so.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=107}}