About the Author

With the novelGo Tell It on the Mountain(1953), a distillation of his own experiences as a preacher's son in 1930s Harlem, and the essay collectionNotes of a Native Son(1955), James Baldwin (1924-1987)established himself as a prophetic voice of his era. Some such voices may grow fainter with the passage of time, but Baldwin remains an inescapable presence, not only a chronicler of his epoch but a thinker who helped shape it.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of the novel High Cotton (1992) and the critical study Out There- Mavericks of Black Literature (2002). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, among other publications.