I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

Published in 1955, the essay collection Notes of a Native Son is Baldwin’s attempt “to understand the contradictions of his country,” writes Eddie Glaude, Jr. “He does so as an artist desperate to make sense of a place that rejected its own reality and as a Black man from Harlem who had to survive the consequences of those contradictions. This kind of work was extraordinarily personal to him.”

“I recently taught the title essay to a group of incarcerated men at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman,” writes W. Ralph Eubanks. “Every man in that class felt that Baldwin understood their lives, which had been shaped by abuse, discrimination, poverty, and oppression. Even the two white men in the class commented that reading ‘Notes of a Native Son’ made racial discrimination feel real in a way it had not to them before. This is a book that shows how Baldwin provides light and understanding to his readers and meets them where they are.”

Presenters

W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi (2021), which takes readers on a complete tour of the real and imagined landscapes that have inspired generations of writers. He has also written Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South. From 1995 to 2013 he was director of publishing for the Library of Congress and is the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2023 he was awarded the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for excellence in literature. Currently he is the faculty fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and is at work on his next book, which focuses on the Mississippi Delta and has the working title When It’s Darkness on the Delta: An American Reckoning. Eubanks serves as President of the Authors Guild.

Eddie Glaude, Jr., is a passionate educator, author, political commentator, and public intellectual who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His books include Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, and Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own, which was a New York Times bestseller. He is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

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