James Baldwin: Mountain to Fire | Introduction

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. By the age of 40, he’d become one of our country’s most influential writers and public intellectuals. Today Baldwin’s novels, including his debut, Go Tell It on the Mountain, are considered classics of American literature. His essays—such as those collected in The Fire Next Time—bear witness to difficult truths and have provided us with an enduring blueprint for understanding race and culture in the United States.

I’m Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I was 14 years old when I first encountered a book by James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son. I even remember the date. It was August 15, 1965, four days following the Watts Riots. I was attending an Episcopal Church camp, named Peterkin, in the Diocese of West Virginia. Unlike James Baldwin, I hadn’t been lucky enough to grow up with access to books by and about Black people, like those he read as a frequent visitor to The New York Public Library’s 135th Street Branch—today known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I was a few pages in before I realized that the face of the Black man on the cover of the book was actually the book’s author! It was at that moment that I first realized that Black people, too, could write books.

Soon after reading Notes of a Native Son, I began to order other “Black books”—which I read about in the pages of Ebony Magazine—through the Book of the Month Club, since those books were not sold in our local bookstore. James Baldwin’s other writings were critical in helping me to figure out who I was in relation to the larger world—the world beyond the Potomac River Valley in the Allegheny Mountains, where my ancestors on both sides of my family had lived for some 200 years. 

Now, as part of the Library’s celebration of Baldwin’s centennial year, we can explore early editions, manuscript drafts, and rare photos that tell the story of Baldwin’s incredible rise from up-and-coming writer to international literary celebrity and leading voice for social justice. It gives me an enormous amount of pleasure to be able to welcome you to James Baldwin: Mountain to Fire, a special display within the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures.