James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924, the eldest of nine children, and raised by his mother and a stern stepfather who was a preacher. At fourteen, Baldwin became a preacher himself, and for three years he held congregations spellbound. He later said that the pulpit taught him how to hold a room, and that he left it because he wanted to tell the truth in a different way.

He found that way through books. A teacher at his junior high school was the poet Countee Cullen, and an older friend, the painter Beauford Delaney, showed him that a Black man could live his life as an artist. In 1948, worn down by American racism, Baldwin bought a one-way ticket to Paris with about forty dollars to his name.

In France he finished his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), drawn from his Harlem boyhood and the storefront church of his youth. Two years later came Notes of a Native Son, essays so clear and unsparing that they changed what American essays could do. Giovanni’s Room (1956), a love story between two men in Paris, was rejected by his publisher; he published it elsewhere.

Baldwin went home to take part in the civil rights movement. In 1962 The New Yorker devoted most of an issue to a long essay of his about race and religion in America, and the next year it appeared as The Fire Next Time, which became a bestseller. He was on the cover of Time. He traveled the South, spoke at rallies, and argued, always, that America could not be free until it faced the truth about itself.

He spent his last years in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a hill town in the south of France, and died there of cancer on December 1, 1987. He left notes for an unfinished book about three murdered friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.; decades later it became the documentary I Am Not Your Negro. His sentences, long and rolling like sermons, are still quoted at every moment when America argues with itself.