Biography of James Arthur Baldwin
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| Biography of James Arthur Baldwin |
• Name: James Arthur Baldwin.
• Born: 2 August 1924, New York City, United States.
• husband : .
• Mother: Emma Birdis Jones.
• wife husband : .
Early life of James Arthur Baldwin:
James Arthur Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924. His mother, Emma Birdis Jones, left his biological father due to his drug abuse. She moved to Harlem, New York, where Baldwin was born in a Harlem hospital. In New York, his mother married David Baldwin, a preacher, with whom he had eight children, born between 1927 and 1943; Her husband also had a son from a previous marriage who was nine years older than James. The family was poor and Baldwin's stepfather was harder on him than the rest of the children.
His unusual intelligence, combined with harassment by his stepfather, led Baldwin to spend most of his time alone in libraries. By the time Baldwin had reached adolescence, he had discovered his passion for writing. His teachers considered him talented, and in 1937, at the age of thirteen, he wrote his first article, "Harlem-Then and Now", which was published in his school's journal, The Douglas Pilot.
Baldwin spent a lot of time caring for many of his younger brothers and sisters. At age 10, he was teased and abused by two New York police officers, an example of racist harassment by the NYPD that he would experience again in his essays as a teenager and documents. His adoptive father, whom Baldwin simply called his father in the essays, seems to have behaved much harsher than his siblings.
After graduating from high school, he began an unhealthy period of sick jobs, self-study and literary apprenticeships in Greenwich Village, Bohemian Quarter in New York City. He left for Paris in 1948, where he lived for the next eight years. (In later years, from 1969, he became a self-styled "transatlantic commuter", alternately living in the south of France and in New York and New England.) His second novel, Giovanni Room (1956), White Belongs to the world and is torn between his love for a man and his love for a woman for an American in Paris. Between the two novels came a collection of essays, an original son's notes (1955).
Baldwin published several poems, short stories and plays in the magazine, and his early work showed an understanding of sophisticated literary devices in an author at such a young age. After graduating high school in 1942, he laid out his plans for college to help support his family, which included seven young children. He took whatever work he could, including laying railroad tracks for the US Army in New Jersey. During this time, Baldwin often faced discrimination, moving away from restaurants, bars and other establishments because he was African American. After being fired from his New Jersey job, Baldwin sought other work and struggled to make ends meet.
Baldwin lived abroad more than in the last fifteen years of his life, but he never relinquished his American citizenship. The citizens of France considered Baldwin one of their own, and was awarded one of the country's highest honors in 1986 when he was named Commander of the Legion of Honor. He died of stomach cancer on 30 November 1987 in Saint-Paul-de-Vance, France, but was buried in Harlem. One of his last works to see publication during his lifetime was a collection of essays titled The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985.
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