James Baldwin

JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN was born in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City to a single mother, Emma Birdis Jones. When he was still young, his mother married a preacher, David Baldwin, who adopted James. The family was poor, and James and his adopted father had a difficult relationship. Baldwin attended the prestigious De Witt Clinton Public High School in New York. At the age of fourteen he joined the Pentecostal Church and became a Pentecostal preacher. When he was seventeen years old, Baldwin turned away from religion and moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City neighborhood famous for its freethinking artists and writers. Supporting himself with odd jobs, he began to write short stories, essays, and book reviews, many of which were later collected in the volume Notes of a Native Son (1955). During this time Baldwin began to recognize his own homosexuality. In 1948, disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and homosexuals, Baldwin left the United States for Paris, France, where he would live for most of his later life.