The best of the best from a powerful voice in the American literary landscape who fearlessly tackled race, sex, politics, and art in his internationally acclaimed novels, short stories, plays, and essays.

[Baldwin] uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearingthe thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought. Langston Hughes

James Baldwin was and remains a powerfully prophetic voice in the American literary landscape. His literary achievement is a lasting legacy about what it means to be American.

Vintage Baldwin includes the short story Sonnys Blues; the galvanizing civil rights examination My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation; the essays Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem, The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American, and Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South; and excerpts from the novelAnother Countryand the play The Amen Corner.

If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one. Michael Ondaatje