Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin

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University of California Press, Jan 29, 2002 - Biography & Autobiography - 326 pages
"James Baldwin was one of America's finest and most influential writers. By the time he died, his books, such as The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room, had become modern classics. James Campbell knew Baldwin for ten years before Baldwin's death in 1987. Based on interviews with his friends and his extensive correspondences, Talking at the Gates gives a full life of Baldwin, including his sometimes turbulent relationships with Norman Mailer, Richard Wright and Marlon Brando, as well as his friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. Elegantly written, candid and original, it is a comprehensive account of the life and work of a writer who believed that 'the unexamined life is not worth living. 'Baldwin's best biographer.' New York Times Book Review 'Approaching Baldwin without reverence, though not quite irreverently, Campbell brings a mixture of intellectual integrity and something like truculence to the biographer's task. ... [He] plays along effectively with Baldwin's great zest for life, his love of the comic, his self-deprecating, balancing knowledge of himself as both poseur and prophet."--Times Literary SupplementDonated by Reginald Harris.

From inside the book

Contents

Lord I aint No Stranger Now
47
A Severe Cross
115
Tear This Building Down
187
Abbreviations Used in Notes
303
Bibliography
313
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

James Campbell is the author of This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris (California, 2001), Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank (1995), and Invisible Country: A Journey through Scotland (1990). He works for the Times Literary Supplement.