Editing James Baldwin (section)

===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}}