The James Baldwin Collection: Collected Essays / Early Novels & Stories / Later Novels

For the first time in a collector's boxed set, the definitive three-volume Library of America James Baldwin edition gathering all his essential writings, including the collected essays and complete fiction.

With the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a distillation of his own experiences as a preacher’s son in 1930s Harlem, and the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin established himself as a prophetic voice of his era. Some such voices may grow fainter with the passage of time, but Baldwin remains an inescapable presence, not only a chronicler of his epoch but a thinker who helped shape it. One of the great modern prose stylists, he applied his passion, wit, and relentlessly probing intelligence to the fault lines and false fronts of American society while remaining true to his early credo: “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”

THE JAMES BALDWIN COLLECTION includes:

Collected Essays (LOA #98)
Notes of a Native Son
Nobody Knows My Name
The Fire Next Time
No Name in the Street
The Devil Finds Work
other essays

Early Novels & Stories (LOA #97)
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Giovanni's Room
Another Country
Going to Meet the Man (including "Sonny's Blues")

Later Novels (LOA #272)
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
If Beale Street Could Talk
Just Above My Head

Edited by Toni Morrison (#97 & 98) and Darrly Pinckney (#272), each volume contains a textual essay, a chronology of Baldwin's life and career, and detailed notes.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the most powerful and prophetic writers of the last century, the literary voice of the Civil Rights era. Some such voices may grow fainter with the passage of time, but Baldwin remains an inescapable presence, not only a chronicler of his epoch but a thinker who helped shape it.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was the author of a number of acclaimed novels, including Love, Jazz, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Sula, and The Bluest Eye. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of the novel High Cotton (1992) and the critical study Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, among other publications.