James Baldwin (1924–1987)  Rage LINKS Biography and Chronological Bibliography of James Baldwin http://www.artswire.org/ocountry/9.htm This site offers a brief bioigraphical sketch followed by a thorough time-line which records Baldwin's publications year by year; it also provides a small list of useful scholarly resources about Baldwin. James Baldwin http://www.bridgesweb.com/baldwin.html This site, which is part of an African American cultural site called Bridges Web Services, offers information about Baldwin and his work, especially his work as a playwright. In particular, the site offers comments and responses to Baldwin's play, Blues for Mr. Charlie. BIOGRAPHY James Baldwin (1924–1987)  Born in New York City, the son of a Harlem minister, Baldwin began preaching as a young teenager. Some years later, he experienced a religious crisis, left the church, and moved to New York City's bohemian Greenwich Village, where he began his career as a writer, supporting himself with menial jobs and publishing occasional articles in journals such as the Nation and Commentary. By the end of the 1940s, Baldwin's anger over the treatment of African Americans led him into exile in France. There, Baldwin completed his acclaimed first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a work in which he drew heavily on his own childhood to depict the lives of members of a Harlem church, focusing on a minister's son. His next work, Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of personal, literary, and social essays, secured Baldwin's reputation as a major American writer. Two later collections of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963), established Baldwin as one of the most powerful voices of the turbulent civil rights movement of the 1960s. But as riots, bombings, and other violence grew more frequent, Baldwin grew increasingly pessimistic over the prospect that white America could ever overcome its racism. That pessimism was deepened by two traumatic events: the 1964 bombing of the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young girls attending a Sunday school class and the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Baldwin began making periodic trips to France, settling there permanently in 1974.