This biography of Baldwin puts the author's life in context—a timeline and several vignettes help illustrate the aftermath of the first World War and the Jazz Age.

Gay Bears: James Baldwin
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/gaybears/baldwin/

This page, part of the University of California at Berkeley's Gay Bears project, offers a brief biography and links to several audio clips, one an interview with Baldwin and the others recordings of a few lectures Baldwin gave at Berkeley.

Poets & Writers: The Literary Life
http://www.pw.org/mag/0407/stein.htm

This excerpt from Sol Stein's introduction to Native Sons chronicles Stein's childhood with Baldwin and his later editorial collaboration with the great author.

More on James Baldwin
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin.html#by

Of the resources featured on this New York Times archive site, including numerous reviews and articles by and about Baldwin, only the audio recordings require registration (which is free).

BIOGRAPHY
James Baldwin (1924-1987). The son of a clergyman, Baldwin was born in Harlem, where he attended public school. While still a high school student he preached at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, but when he was seventeen he renounced the ministry. Two years later, living in Greenwich Village, he met Richard Wright, who encouraged him to be a writer and helped him win a Eugene Saxton Fellowship. Soon afterward Baldwin moved to France, as Wright had, to escape the stifling racial oppression he found in the United States. Although France was his more or less permanent residence until his death from cancer nearly forty years later, Baldwin regarded himself as a "commuter" rather an expatriate.

Baldwin's publishing career began with his highly acclaimed first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which was based on his childhood in Harlem and his fear of his tyrannical father. Baldwin's frank depiction of homosexuality in the novels Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1962) drew criticism, but during the civil rights movement a few years later, he established himself as a brilliant essayist. In his lifetime, Baldwin published several collections of essays, three more novels, and a book of five short stories, Going to Meet the Man (1965).