Notes of a Native Son

Baldwin's 1955 first essay collection — founding text of his mature essayistic voice

Tradition: African American literary-political essay

Baldwin's founding essay collection — title essay on his father, "Stranger in the Village," Paris pieces

Notes of a Native Son (1955) is James Baldwin's (1924-1987) first essay collection — ten essays gathered from his work between 1948 and 1955 in Partisan Review, Commentary, Harper's, The New Leader, and other venues — establishing the prose voice that would make Baldwin one of the most important essayistic writers in twentieth-century American letters. The collection's opening pair of essays — 'Everybody's Protest Novel' (1949) and 'Many Thousands Gone' (1951) — together constitute Baldwin's famous early break with the protest-fiction tradition exemplified by Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), arguing that protest fiction unintentionally reproduces the dehumanising categories it ostensibly opposes by reducing characters to social-categorial-types rather than rendering them in their full personal complexity. The title essay — 'Notes of a Native Son' (1955) — is one of the most-anthologised essays in American letters: Baldwin interleaves the account of his stepfather David Baldwin's death (July 29, 1943, the same day the Harlem riot began) with reflection on the racial-emotional inheritance Black Americans receive from such fathers, the texture of growing up in Harlem, and the question of how to live without being either consumed by hatred or paralysed by despair. Other essays — 'Stranger in the Village' (on Baldwin's experience as the only Black man any of the inhabitants of a small Swiss alpine village had ever seen), 'Equal in Paris' (on Baldwin's brief 1949 imprisonment after a stolen-bedsheet misunderstanding), 'A Question of Identity,' 'Encounter on the Seine' (on Black-American expatriate-Paris life) — extend Baldwin's distinctive interweaving of personal-confessional and political-analytical registers. Notes is the founding text of Baldwin's essayistic voice, the prose register that would carry through Nobody Knows My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976), and that has been deeply influential on subsequent Black-American essayists (Ta-Nehisi Coates explicitly, Hilton Als, Margo Jefferson, Brit Bennett, Kiese Laymon).