Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin was born in 1924 and educated in New York. Go Tell It on the Mountain, his rst novel, was published in 1953. Evoking brilliantly his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, it was an immediate success. His second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), explores the theme of homosexual love in a sensitive and compelling way. Another Country (1962) created something of a literary explosion with its examination of racial issues in the US. Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) contain several of the essays that brought him fame in America. Nobody Knows My Name was selected by the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of its year. He published several other collections of non- ction, including The Fire Next Time (1963), Nothing Personal (with photographs by Richard Avedon, 1964), No Name in the Street (1972), The Devil Finds Work (1976), The Price of the Ticket (1985) and Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985); and he wrote the plays The Amen Corner (1955) and Blues for Mr Charlie (1965). His short stories were collected in the volume Going to Meet the Man (1965). His later works include the novels Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1973) and Just Above My Head (1979); Little Man, Little Man (1976), a book for children; and Jimmy’s Blues (1985), a volume of poetry. Many of his books are published in Penguin.
James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships: a Eugene F.
Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987.
The Times obituary declared, ‘The best of his work… stands comparison with any of its period to come out of the United States,’
while, Newsweek described him as ‘an angry writer, yet his intelligence was so provoking and his sentences so elegant that he quickly became the black writer that white liberals liked to fear’.
Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts, West Indies. Brought up in England, he has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema. He is the author of two books of non- ction, The European Tribe and The Atlantic Sound, and six novels, including Crossing the River, which was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize, and The Nature of Blood.
His awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
His latest book, A New World Order: Selected Essays, was recently published.