James Baldwin’s Best Books - The New York Times
He wrote with the kind of clarity that was as comforting as it was chastising. Here’s where to start. Credit... Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet, via Getty Images Supported by By Robert Jones Jr. Robert Jones Jr. is the author of the novel “The Prophets.” James Baldwin would have turned 100 on Aug. 2 this year. His final works were published almost 40 years ago, just two years before his death in 1987. Yet his writing is as imperative as ever. He wrote with the kind of moral vision that was as comforting as it was chastising — almost surely the influence of the pulpit he once occupied as a child preacher in his native Harlem. Baldwin never went to college, but he read, by his own count, every book in the library. Remarkably, he never received any of the major literary awards. But he wrote with grace and aplomb across genre: essay, novel, short story, song, children’s literature, drama, poetry and, infamously, screenplay. I say infamously because he was hired to write the script for a M
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