You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other live. You won't live at all.
BY IRIDE APARICIO
SILICON VALLEY, CA-- Born in Harlem, New York, NY on August 1, l924, JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN was a prolific essayist, a novelist, a playwright and a social critic. But because he was gay and a Black, his masterful prose reflected not only on his sexuality and his race, but on themes which affected all Americans at the time such as social justice and religion. He was an activist and the Voice of the American Civil rights movement.
In his writing such as Go Tell it on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room and If Beale Street Could Talk, BALDWIN approaches, with candor, the psychological pressure affecting both Black Americans and individuals with different sexual orientation which was then considered a taboo subject.
Also in his essays collected in Native Son, which he wrote in l955, he explores the intricacies of the racial, the sexual and the class distinctions in the Western Society of the United States during the mid twentieth-century. His essays are book length in The Fire Next Tine written in l963, No Name in the Street, written in l972 and The Devil Find Work written in l976, An there is also an unfinished manuscript, Remember this House, which was later expanded in the Academy Award-Nominated film I am not Your Negro (2016)
And is interesting to note, that in his novels, short stories and plays, BALDWIN explored complex dilemmas and asked question on different social and psychological characteristics in themes in which he explored sexuality, masculinity, race, social classes some of which ran parallel with the time's political movements, the gay liberation, and not exclusive of the problems experienced , at the time, and the protagonists of his novels may be White gay, of bisexual men searching for social acceptance, or in search of social justice, but not always African Americans.
JAMES BALDWIN died at age 63 on December 1, 1987, in his home in Paul de Vence, France.
