Another Country

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In the early 1950s, as he was winning fame as a novelist, James Baldwin published a number of essays about the state of his nation which were passionately and elegantly written. His style was not that of the Bible or the pulpit (Baldwin had been a child preacher) but took its bearings from the early sources of English eloquence: Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, William Hazlitt. His tone did, however, borrow something from his preacher days: it was fearless and urgent, combining a concern about public policy and public attitudes with a probing and oddly intimate concern with the dark and uncharted spaces within the self. Baldwin’s nation in these essays was emphatically America, his self an American self. His voice, so stylish, insisted that the language — English — in all its nuance and subtlety belonged to him, just as America in all its cruelty and hatred belonged to him too.

Baldwin published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1953 when he was twenty-nine. Two years later his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, came out, and in 1956 his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, was published. In 1961 he published a second book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, and the following year his third novel, Another Country, an immediate bestseller in the United States, appeared. The success of his early books allowed his restlessness and his mercurial nature an immense freedom. Between 1956, when he began to work in earnest on Another Country (there are also some versions and drafts from much earlier) and the end of 1961, when the book was finished, James Baldwin crossed the Atlantic by sea at least six times. He moved between Paris and New York, but he did not stay for long in either place.

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