Volume 26, Number 19 · December 6, 1979
Blues for Mr. Baldwin
By Darryl Pinckney
Just Above My Head
by James Baldwin
Dial, 597 pp., $12.95
James Baldwin, born in Harlem in 1924, became a boy preacher when he was fourteen. He left the church when he was seventeen and transformed himself into a writer of extraordinary rhetorical refinement, but there remained in his style, in his baroque sense of grievance, the atmosphere of the pulpit. In works like The Fire Next Time (1963), an exalted rhetoric rushes out, as in a sermon, to meet the bitterness of American life.
Review, 2507 words
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