James Baldwin: A Biography [Hardcover]

David Leeming (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 1994

Provides an incisive look inside the complex life of the twentieth-century's most influential black writer, discussing his extraordinary literary works, his homosexuality, and his struggle against white society's denial of African-American identity. 30,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

James Baldwin (1924-1987), whose novels and essays aimed to liberate white America from the hypocrisy that made oppression and racism possible, was obsessed with his mission to bear witness to injustice, observes Leeming, who was Baldwin's secretary and longtime friend. Beneath the fiercely eloquent, prophetic writer was a troubled, vulnerable, lonely individual longing to be cradled and protected. Both sides of the man are probed in this highly perceptive, revealing biography, which Baldwin authorized in 1979. Leeming, who is now a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, draws on interviews with Baldwin to illuminate the writer's difficulty in accepting his homosexuality, his attempted suicide in Paris in 1956, the strong autobiographical component in his fiction, his uneasy association with the Black Panthers and his formative relationship with his unloving stepfather, a puritanical, bitterly frustrated preacher who went mad. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Conscience-afflicting prose that probed what it meant to be an American, a Negro, and a male put Baldwin (1924-87) in the first rank of 20th-century American writers. His one-time personal secretary Leeming argues in this biography, which Baldwin reportedly authorized before his death, that the writer was a prophet and witness tormented by demons of illegitimacy and racial and sexual alienation. Obsessed with the question of identity and struggling to work out a vision of his life, Baldwin ( Go Tell It on the Mountain; Giovanni's Room ) necessarily welded his writing from autobiography. The personal Baldwin that Leeming contributes will be indispensable to Baldwin scholars and a complement to other recent works of evaluation such as James Campbell's Talking at the Gates ( LJ 4/1/91), William J. Weatherby's James Baldwin: Artist on Fire ( LJ 5/1/89), and Horace A. Porter's Stealing the Fire ( LJ 2/1/89). Recommended for collections on Baldwin, blacks, and 20th-century U.S. society and literature.
- Thomas J. Davis, SUNY at Buffalo
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 442 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (March 29, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394577086
• ISBN-13: 978-0394577081
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,118,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A MASTERFUL PORTRAIT OF AN ENIGMATIC GENIUS, November 2, 2005

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: James Baldwin: A Biography (Hardcover)

His stepfather made fun of his eyes, and called him "the ugliest child he had ever seen." This was a two-pronged insult because James Baldwin had his mother's eyes.

As long as he lived, Baldwin would retell an incident related to that memory that he said changed the course of his life. When he was perhaps five or six-years-old, he was amazed to see on the street an old woman with large eyes and lips. He ran upstairs, called his mother to the window, and said, "You see? You see? She's uglier than you, Mama! She's uglier than me!"

The significant aspect of seeing that face on the street would take Baldwin many years to articulate. He learned that his physical appearance did not necessarily have an effect on what he would do in life, "that if his mother was `ugly," then even ugliness could be beautiful."

And this unattractive, intellectually precocious boy became the man who would write like no other, chronicling America in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. He gave us the novels "Go Tell It On The Mountain," "Giovanni's Room," and "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone."

Baldwin used to say to white audiences, "I've been here for 350 years and you've never seen me." That sense of alienation is evoked in the titles of his collections of essays, "Nobody Knows My Name" and "No Name in the Street." Undoubtedly, students of sociology yet unborn will pore over these words to better understand America in the 20th century.

Other biographies have been written about James Baldwin - none as personal, revealing and poignant as this. David Leeming, Baldwin's associate for four years and friend for a quarter of a century has produced a masterful portrait of one of our country's most enigmatic geniuses.

- Gail Cooke

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Baldwin fan? Read this for the info., not the writing., December 15, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: James Baldwin: A Biography (Hardcover)

I haven't read many biographies, but I have read lots of Baldwin -- both essays and novels. I came away from this book wishing that it was as compelling as its subject -- that Leeming had contributed his insights to the efforts of a writer closer to Baldwin's caliber -- and that the book had the benefit of a better editor. There is a sense that perhaps Leeming reveres Baldwin a bit too much. It's hard to communicate a true sense of intimacy with your subject when he's so high up on a pedestal! Overall, a disappointment.