At first glance, Henry James and James Baldwin may seem worlds apart. Yet they share much in common. Both are New Yorkers; both spent a good deal of their lives as expatriates; both are celebrated for their queerness, a feature of their style as much as their sexuality. Both were serious, moralizing, and passionate observers of the “American Scene”; both writers are deeply committed to investigating and exploring the privacy of consciousness and the currency of experience. Henry James was James Baldwin’s favorite writer. Colm Tóibín has called Baldwin “the Henry James of Harlem.” Both writers were deeply preoccupied with identity, the question of what it means to be an American, and how it is possible to tell the truth, or to distort it, using the art of fiction.

In our introductory course, we will examine one of Baldwin’s most famous pieces of literary criticism, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” and read it alongside some of the most celebrated passages from Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction.” We will explore the context for these literary credos and pay special attention to Baldwin’s grappling with the legacy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son. Together, we will untangle the difficult question of how Baldwin connects the history of literature and cultural mythology to the quest for personal freedom and truth that he spent his life pursuing in his own writings.

Presenter

Jesse McCarthy, co-curator of Reading James Baldwin alongside the Authors Guild Foundation, is a professor at Harvard and the author of the monograph The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (2024); the award-winning essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? (2022); and the novel The Fugivities (2021). He has edited W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk for Norton and (with Joshua Bennett) Minor Notes, Volume 1, an anthology of African-American poetry.

Few American writers have marked their era as powerfully as James Baldwin. As distinctive on the page as on the airwaves, his voice is indelibly associated with the demand for racial justice in the United States, a demand that continues to make him one of our most pressing and urgent contemporaries.

To mark Baldwin’s centenary, the Authors Guild Foundation invites you to join a conversation featuring some of our most exciting writers, scholars, and essayists as we gather to celebrate, study, and reflect on the legacy of Baldwin’s life and work.

The painting of James Baldwin in the graphic above is by Beauford Delaney and reprinted courtesy of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), James Baldwin, c.1945–50, oil on canvasboard, 24 x 18 inches / 61 x 45.7 cm, estate stamp; Private Collection; © Estate of Beauford Delaney, by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY