Volume 47, Number 6 · April 13, 2000
James Baldwin: The Risks of Love
By Darryl Pinckney
James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories
edited by Toni Morrison
Library of America, 970 pp., $35.00
James Baldwin had a way of sometimes signing off at the end of his books—'Istanbul, Dec. 10, 1961,' 'New York, Istanbul, San Francisco, 1965-1967,' or 'Oct. 12, 1973, St. Paul de Vence.' Maybe the words spoke to Baldwin about the labor of composition, suggesting rooms where he'd worked, nights when he'd struggled. Think of 'Dublin 1904/Trieste 1914.' As a way of signing off along the road Baldwin was traveling, such markers also said something about the glamour and cosmopolitanism that being a writer had always meant to him.
Review, 10389 words
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