The last time I wrote about James Baldwin, in the late 1990s, I concluded that his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was his best, and that his second, Giovanni’s Room, was sentimental, artificial, and populated by stock figures—in fact I agreed with Norman Mailer’s assessment that the novel, dealing openly in Eisenhower’s America with homosexuality, was “brave” but “bad.” Now hailed as a seminal work, it had been turned down by Knopf, who had published Go Tell It on the Mountain. (The novel was eventually published by Dial.) Baldwin assumed that Knopf had expected him to take up the mantle of “Negro writer” and stick to racial subjects, which Giovanni’s Room did not address; or perhaps they had been made nervous by the gay content. But Henry Carlisle, the editor who ruled against it, was not an unworldly man, and I think one can take at face value his objection that the book lacked credible characters and would not enhance the author’s reputation. Baldwin’s fiction continued to decline from there. His essays, too, at first so potent, shocking, and pungent, lost their kick after 1963’s brilliant The Fire Next Time; by 1972, with No Name in the Street, his thinking had slackened, and eventually it petrified. I still stand by these judgments, while being bowled over by Baldwin’s better work and enormously sympathetic to the man himself, insofar as I can reconstruct him from his writings and the reminiscences of those who knew him.
 
In the later part of the twentieth century I was far from being alone in this assessment. The apex of Baldwin’s career was probably 1963, when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. In fact his reputation had begun its decline in the later ’60s, when Baldwin, as Hilton Als writes,[1] “was finding impersonating a Black writer more seductive than being an artist. . . . By the time the Black Power movement had started to ebb, Baldwin was adrift not only politically but aesthetically.” In the 1970s and ’80s, as the critic Douglas Field has remarked,[2] he was seen as passé, “pictured carousing with Nina Simone and Miles Davis in the south of France, rather than focusing on his craft or shaking his fist at the white Establishment. . . . Baldwin had stopped taking interest in his craft. . . . [T]here are some stunning set pieces in his later novels, but they are not supported by tight structure or clear plotting.” The last years of Baldwin’s life were not edifying. Embittered and out of step, he seemed a figure from the past, overshadowed by (though just as angry as) the more militant and macho voices of the Black Power movement, exiling himself in Istanbul and Saint-Paul-de-Vence and surrounding himself with admirers and gigolos.
 
So what happened? If there is any American secular saint in 2025, it would have to be James Baldwin—and that status has even been cemented with a “James Baldwin Secular Saint Candle” that allows consumers to show “devotion to James Baldwin, patron saint of poets, uncles, and exiles.” In fact, as Field goes on to note, you can furnish your entire house with Baldwin merch and adorn your body with it as well.
 
The turning point seems to have been the murders of Michael Brown and George Floyd and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, at which moment Baldwin’s musings and assertions became newly relevant as increasing numbers of people took the line that despite the many legal victories of the last sixty or seventy years, racism and racial violence have hardly been eradicated. Many of Baldwin’s more assertive and angry statements became maxims and slogans for a new generation who had not read the books and essays, hence had not comprehended the man’s apparently infinite number of contrasting ideas and his ability to live with these contradictions—his great charm, his magic power. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined intelligence as the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function; by this standard Baldwin was supremely intelligent, though it must be admitted that he did not always function well. Thoughtful Black critics like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Eddie Glaude, Jr., looked anew at Baldwin’s writings, finding them surprisingly relevant to current events, and Raoul Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro revealed to new generations Baldwin’s personal charm and his stunning rhetorical powers, burnished by his early years as a child Pentecostal preacher in Harlem and his later ones as a lecturer and talk-show regular. But Baldwin’s unwillingness, finally, to take any politically doctrinaire line made his oeuvre ripe, as Thomas Chatterton Williams has observed, for cherry-picking. You can find backup for almost any opinion if you look hard enough. He was passionately anti-ideological. “Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.”
 
Hence the absurdity of the bland assumption among some writers of the younger generation that Baldwin would embrace the modern idea of intersectionality. Despite his ready admission that he was thrice challenged—Black, queer, and disadvantaged (at least initially!)—Baldwin’s core philosophy was the essential unity of humanity, “his rejection of all labels and fixed notions of identity as ‘myths’ or ‘lies,’” as his biographer Magdalena J. Zaborowska has written,[3] and she provides ample evidence for this judgment. Art, Baldwin stated, “has its roots in the lives of human beings: the weakness, the strength, the absurdity. . . . It belongs to all of us, and this includes our foes, who are as desperate and as vacuous and as blind as we are and who can only be as evil as we are ourselves.” “[A] victim,” he wrote, “may or may not have a color, just as he may or may not have virtue.” Baldwin’s realization that suffering does not create virtue and that victims are not necessarily good people was, as he knew, a “difficult . . . unpopular notion, for nearly everyone prefers to be defined by his status, which, unlike his virtue, is ready to wear.”
 
This is even more true today, when the intersectional grid draws rigid lines between “oppressor” and “oppressed” that Baldwin, despite the animus against white America that ballooned as he aged, was far too subtle a thinker to accept. His friendships with Jews, whites, Communists, and atheists at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx made him suspicious of easy racial categorization, and “[t]he rich mix of his white, Black, Jewish, leftist, southern, and queer teachers and mentors helped him craft the sophisticated literary tools he used to reach that understanding,” as Zaborowska says. “Baldwin’s voice in the decades-long discussion of Black-Jewish relations during the Cold War remains one of the most insightful, and the kindest.” As for gender and sexuality, Baldwin resisted all categories: gay and straight, male and female—despite the sad fact that the female characters in his fiction tend to be sketchy and unconvincing. As Colm Tóibín, who strongly identifies with Baldwin, has written,[4]

every novelist, by creating a character at all, makes someone whom only the novelist might fully and vividly recognize, an emerging self that lives within the self, passing for real, passing for fictional, wavering and hovering in the dream-space between the two. A novelist can create a self-portrait; a woman novelist can make a man; a contemporary novelist can make a figure from the past; an Irish novelist can make a German; a straight novelist can make a homosexual; an African American novelist can make a White American.
 
Novelists slowly refashion themselves and, as a result, characters emerge on the page and then in the reader’s imagination as though nothing untoward had, in fact, occurred. It is called freedom, or what James Baldwin, in another context, called “the common history—ours.”

Hence Baldwin’s decision to make the protagonist of Giovanni’s Room white, an imaginative leap that was not appreciated by everyone at the time but raises no hackles now. In 1961, when he took up residence for several months in his friend William Styron’s Connecticut guesthouse, he encouraged Styron, a Virginian and the grandson of a slave owner, to attempt a similar feat: to write a novel from the point of view of an enslaved Black man, the rebel Nat Turner. Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) earned rave reviews, a Pulitzer Prize, and an honorary doctorate from Wilberforce University, the first American university to be owned and governed by Black people. But the blowback from the Black intelligentsia was almost immediate; Styron later realized that he had unwittingly produced the first politically incorrect novel. William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond appeared the following year, attacking the presumption in a man of Styron’s race and origins to imagine he could conceive thoughts for someone like Turner. John Oliver Killens’ response is characteristic of all ten writers (no women were included—this was the ’60s):

Styron tells us about the story of Nat Turner, but he is not of the story, and the reader does not feel it, does not live it, for the simple reason that the author has not felt it, has not lived the reality of being black in a white supremacist society.

This is of course exactly the opposite of Baldwin’s thoughts on the subject, echoed by Tóibín: we are all human, and it is the challenge and the duty of the artist to penetrate surfaces and see through artificial categories to get at the essence of the human. This is what he had encouraged Styron to do, and he was happy to defend his friend’s novel in the face of Black hostility. Looking back on his own artistic growth, he articulated the philosophy clearly:

I was a black kid and was expected to write from that perspective. Yet I had to realize the black perspective was dictated by the white imagination. Since I wouldn’t write from the perspective, essentially, of the victim, I had to find what my own perspective was and then use it. I couldn’t talk about “them” and “us.” So I had to use “we” and let the reader figure out who “we” is. That was the only possible choice of pronoun. It had to be “we.” And we had to figure out who “we” was, or who “we” is. That was very liberating for me.

Decades after Baldwin and Styron’s long Connecticut confabulation, we are left to draw the sad conclusion that even sixty years’ distance is not enough for art to be judged on its own merits, absent political bias. As I said, Baldwin’s white narrator raises no hackles in 2025, whereas Styron’s reputation was permanently tainted by his attempt to write in a Black voice—though Nat Turner remains a fine novel. Few people read it today, while Giovanni’s Room seems to be everywhere.
 
Baldwin’s protean nature and his ability to see from many points of view (which diminished, alas, over time) has led many of his readers to identify with him personally: cherry-picking, perhaps, from his multiple points of view, but finding points of emotional commonality that make the by-now-long-dead author immediate and alive to them. The centenary of his birth in 2024 inspired an enormous array of Baldwin-themed books, of which five recently came my way. I was immediately struck by how each author took whatever aspect of Baldwin was most meaningful to him or her and magnified it.
 
Colm Tóibín, for instance. I would not have remarked on the parallels between this brilliant Irish writer and Baldwin, but they are very striking to him. Their religious backgrounds, for one thing. The storefront Harlem Pentecostal church in the one case, the Enniscorthy cathedral in the other: these ecclesiastical experiences, while both Christian, and a generation apart, could hardly have been more different, but Tóibín recognizes the effect their many adolescent hours in church—Baldwin as a child preacher, himself as an altar boy—had on their prose. “Words are repeated as a way of making a statement appear natural, almost casual, but also, in other passages, as they might appear in a psalm or a prayer”; it was a “language of religious intonation.” He recognizes, too, the mixing-up in both cases of their early religious impulses and indoctrination with their sexuality. “I did not connect my interest in religious ritual with my own pale, hidden homosexuality,” Tóibín recalls. In discussing Go Tell It on the Mountain, he connects young John Grimes’s fascination with the slightly older teenaged deacon Elisha, endowed with “leanness, and grace, and strength”; John sublimates his sexual attraction to the older boy by deeming him “holy.”
 
Migration, emigration, makes another connection between the African American Baldwin and the Irish Tóibín, individually and culturally. “In Ireland, emigration was part of life enough to be surrounded by silence. . . . There was a sense that once you left, you belonged neither in the place you had gone to or the place you might have once called home.” For Baldwin, the Old Country—the place surrounded by silence—was the American South; like so many Northern Blacks of his age, he was a child of the Great Migration. He could not even bring himself to visit the region until 1957, when he was thirty-three years old. Early on he exiled himself in turn to Europe, as the Irish James Joyce had done before him. Living mostly in Paris between 1948 and 1957, he was well aware that while American Blacks were warmly welcomed there, brown North Africans were treated with the casual violence meted out to his own people back home; but he was able to turn his back on this uncomfortable fact and accept with gratitude the respect he received from his new French friends. If he had stayed in the U.S., he felt, he might have committed a murder or thrown himself off the George Washington Bridge like one of the companions of his youth.
 
Douglas Field, a British academic specializing in American literature at the University of Manchester and a founding editor of the James Baldwin Review, was introduced to Baldwin very early by his father Richard, a secondary schoolteacher who had been fortunate enough, while reading English at Cambridge, to have been present at the famous 1965 Cambridge Union debate between Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr. Richard Field thrilled his son with descriptions of the event: when Baldwin spoke, “his presence pinned you to your chair. I had never heard such fierce eloquence.” A recent article by Sam Tanenhaus in The Atlantic confirms Richard’s memory: Baldwin’s ovation lasted a full minute. “The whole of the union standing and applauding this magnificent speech of James Baldwin,” exclaimed the BBC commentator at the time. “Never seen this happen before.”
 
Again, Field identifies with Baldwin, different as their lives have been in almost every way. The sympathy and admiration is profound; the connections in their circumstances more tenuous. Field finds common ground in their fathers—again, about as different as two men could possibly be—through the degeneration of their brains in later life, Richard Field from Alzheimer’s and David Baldwin (in reality James’s stepfather) from a sort of degenerating paranoia. “Baldwin’s description of his father’s ‘disease of his mind’ is painfully reminiscent of my own father’s brain, and, in particular, the changes to his hippocampus.”
 
Field’s descriptions of his rather fascinating father and his sad decline make good reading, but the connection with Baldwin is a bit far-fetched and doesn’t really work. Still, Field is an excellent writer and a good interpreter of Baldwin’s work, and he manages to be scholarly and accessible simultaneously, not always an easy feat. So does Magdalena J. Zaborowska, professor and chair of the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, in what is essentially a straightforward biography of her hero. Like the other authors in this survey, she feels a personal connection and addresses him directly: “A bisexual immigrant woman from Cold War Poland, I was the same age when I came to the United States that you were when you first left it.” She can occasionally lapse into twenty-first-century jargon (“I call the approach I see in your work Black queer humanism, although I realize that you weren’t exactly down with either ‘Black’ or ‘queer’ as labels”). But essentially James Baldwin: The Life Album is an admirable work, balanced and intelligent.
 
I sorely missed the scholarly virtues of Zaborowska and Field when I tackled Baldwin, Styron, and Me[5] by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, a Québécois-Tunisian author, born in the 1970s, who grew up in Quebec and has lived in France as well. The Styron/Baldwin friendship would make an excellent subject for a strong writer to tackle, but Abdelmoumen, a novelist, essayist, and editor who holds a PhD from the University of Montreal in literary studies, has produced a work of startling inanity. Not only is she separated from her two subjects by culture, language, and a couple of generations, but she also appears to be totally without humor, a powerful facet of both these men, without which they would probably have committed suicide. It is ludicrous for a woman of extreme naïveté, without the imaginative resources or the discipline to conceive of what social and intellectual life might really have been like in the early 1960s, to put words into the mouths of two of the most articulate and sophisticated thinkers of their generation. And yet she is confident enough to create imaginary, uncharacteristically solemn dialogues between them (for some reason referring to them as William and James rather than Styron and Baldwin—though they were Bill and Jimmy to each other) that makes both men sound like earnest twenty-first-century NPR commentators.
 
In spite of her PhD, Abdelmoumen has been content to rely on secondary sources and her own fallible speculations rather than to contact any of the people, of whom there remain quite a few, who actually knew either of the two men. At one point she wonders whether Styron ever met any of the ten Black writers who attacked Nat Turner after their book came out, but then says, “But really, what do we know? . . . Who can say?” Rose Styron, Bill’s widow and very much still with us, could have told her, and their children probably could have too, but she clearly made no attempt to communicate with any of them. There are also factual errors. Styron did not come from a Catholic family. He did have a Black friend before Baldwin—the godfather of his son, born in 1959, was Black, although perhaps Abdelmoumen simply meant that he had not had a Black friend who was his intellectual and/or social equal. And when she says “William” had never heard jazz before he met “James,” one can only laugh—it was 1961, after all, and Styron had been living in Paris. She imagines Styron’s “liberal, white friends” in Connecticut being horrified, “their mouths hanging open, the blood drained from their faces” as they heard Baldwin bursting their complacent bubbles. In fact Baldwin’s visit was a delight and a high point that the Styrons’ guests remembered with pleasure for decades afterward.
 
It is a relief to move from this inanity to Baldwin’s most intelligent and elegant critic, Hilton Als. One wishes the two men had had an opportunity to meet. God Made My Face, Als’s collection of essays about Baldwin, accompanied by relevant paintings and photographs, brings together work by people like Darryl Pinckney, Jamaica Kincaid, and Baldwin’s authorized biographer, David Leeming, but it is Als’s own writing that mesmerizes, that captures Baldwin in a way I’ve never quite heard before.

I think that serious readers of Baldwin strip themselves bare for him because he’s already taken off his clothes and sat naked before us. Many times. Many. . . . In my early days with Baldwin, I was amazed by how he was . . . able to convey, in his labyrinthine, emotional prose, the persistent guilt that I felt before my family—the family I would need to leave to become myself. And what compounded the guilt was the vague suspicion that in leaving them behind, I would be leaving my Blackness behind as well, to join the white world . . .

An admirer, yes, and another writer who closely identified with Baldwin—and yet not a worshipper. Along with the high seriousness, Als also understands Baldwin’s broad streak of showmanship, a certain emotional and intellectual exhibitionism.

Baldwin was a showgirl, too, and if you listen to his high-faggoty style . . . you’re hearing him wave big fans of rhetoric in spangled air, trying to claim your attention in a whole and beautiful body he wanted others to dream about and want as much as they wanted other people.

In the same volume, Teju Cole’s remarks on the changes that have come about since Baldwin’s youth are worth paying attention to. In the 1950s there was “a certain narrowness in received ideas of Black culture,” he comments.

In the time since then, there has been enough Black cultural achievement from which to compile an all-star team: there’s been Coltrane and Monk and Miles, and Ella and Billie and Aretha. Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott happened, as did Audre Lord, and Chinua Achebe, and Bob Marley. The body was not abandoned for the mind’s sake: Alvin Ailey, Arthur Ashe, and Michael Jordan happened, too. The source of jazz and the blues also gave the world hip-hop, Afrobeat, dancehall, and house. And yes, when James Baldwin died in 1987, he, too, was recognized as an all-star.

Indeed—and in the twenty-first century he is more celebrated than in any time since the 1960s. It will be interesting to see how long this big Baldwin moment lasts.

[1] God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, ed. by Hilton Als. Dancing Foxes Press/Brooklyn Museum. $39.95.
 
[2] Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me, by Douglas Field. Manchester University Press. $24.95.
 
[3] James Baldwin: The Life Album, by Magdalena J. Zaborowska. Yale University Press. $28.00.
 
[4] On James Baldwin, by Colm Tóibín. Brandeis University Press. $19.95.
 
[5] Baldwin, Styron, and Me, by Mélikah Abdelmoumen. Biblioasis. $17.95p.