James Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924. His name at birth was James Arthur Jones. Baldwin never knew his father; his mother, who was originally from Maryland, was named Emma Burdis Jones. In 1927, she married David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher and factory worker from New Orleans with a twelve-year-old son, and thus the future writer received the last name that he was to make famous. Together the couple went on to have six children of their own, three sons and three daughters, the last of which was born on the same day that David Baldwin died, July 29, 1943.
             In 1935, James entered Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he wrote for and helped to edit the school magazine. From 1938 until his graduation in 1942, Baldwin attended De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He had a religious experience in 1938, and for the next three years was a boy preacher at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, a phase of his life that ended at the time of his high-school graduation.
             For the next several years, he worked at a variety of jobs, including waiting tables in Greenwich Village, where he had moved to further his artistic ambitions. In 1944, he met Richard Wright, author of the novel Native Son and the soon-to-be-published autobiography Black Boy, who encouraged his literary ambitions and recommended hi to his own publisher. Write allowed Baldwin the financial freedom he needed to concentrate solely on his writing.
             In 1948 Baldwin moved to Paris where he joined a group of black writers and artists that included Chester Himes, Richard Wright and Ollie Harrington. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953, concerned a young boy coming to terms with the religious beliefs of his father. His second novel, Giovanni's Room in 1956, is an account of an American living in Paris. In 1957 Baldwin return to the United States where he became involved in the struggle for civil rights. Baldwin quickly discovered that social con...