New Volume of James Baldwin Writings Demonstrates Timelessness: James Baldwin's passionate hope for a better America, a United States that he wanted to believe in and that believes in a brilliant Black person, comes through in each piece of this disparate collection.Editor Randall Kenan, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, calls the compendium 'a collection of snapshots.' And the writings are haphazard. But these are snapshots in the best sense: glimpses deep inside a life lived daringly and fervently, if not always with politic attention to Baldwin's colleagues and compatriots.
Kenan offers Baldwin as a 'probable impossibility.' What made him an 'impossibility' ranges from his birth to a single mother in the Jim Crow South and his childhood in a poor fundamentalist preacher's family in New York City's Harlem neighborhood to his escape in 1948 to Europe, where both his homosexuality and his persistence as an intellectual were more viable.
