DPLA: Primary Source Set: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin"Writer, novelist, and social critic James Baldwin was among the leading voices of the twentieth century on race relations and the African American experience. Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924 and his experience of poverty, racism, and segregation profoundly influenced his writing. To escape the limitations of American racism and the stigma he faced as a gay man, Baldwin spent much of his adult life living in France, though he always considered himself an American and returned to the US often to advocate for civil rights and social justice.
The Fire Next Time was published in 1963 in the midst of the civil rights and black nationalist movements. The book consists of two essays, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind.” In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin uses anecdotes from his personal experiences to confront and explore broader themes in American race relations, including the role of religion in black communities, the hypocrisies of American Christianity, the inextricable links between black and white America, the fear of confronting America’s history of hate and white supremacy, and his vision of love—or a sincere quest for mutual understanding and compassion—as crucial to the salvation of the country. Baldwin was already a popular and well-respected writer, but The Fire Next Time launched him to a new level of celebrity. This set explores Baldwin’s upbringing in Harlem as well as the contemporary context of the The Fire Next Time."