James baldwin brief biography of martin luther

In 1944, Baldwin met Richard Wright, who was the famous African American male writer at the time, and whose work spoke to his sensibility. In time, Wright would also become his mentor, for Baldwin appreciated Wright’s strong opinions about race in America, and he also greatly valued their intellectual exchanges. Wright helped Baldwin to obtain a fellowship to write his first novel, which enabled him to leave for Paris in 1948, where the older writer had relocated a few years earlier. However, while in France, the two were often at odds about the ways in which they approached race in their writings. Baldwin wrote three essays explicating his critique of Wright’s “protest art” in the novel Native Son (1940); their disagreement eventually led to the demise of their friendship, which Baldwin regretted after Wright’s death in 1960.

In 1948, at age twenty-four, Baldwin left the United States to live in Paris, France, as he could not tolerate the racial and sexual discrimination he experienced daily. As Kendall Thomas, professor of law and critical race studies at Columbia University, explains, Baldwin left his country because of racism, and Harlem because of homophobia—two aspects of his identity that made him a frequent target of beatings by local youth and the police. When asked about his departure, Baldwin explained in a The Paris Review interview from 1984, “My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.” In Paris, Baldwin began to interact with other writers. He reconnected with Richard Wright, and for the first time, he met Maya Angelou, with whom he maintained a close relationship until the end of his life.

Baldwin would spend the next forty years abroad, where he wrote and published most of his works. Between 1948 and 1957 he lived in France and traveled in Europe, and from 1961 to 1970, Baldwin lived for long periods in Istanbul and visited many other places in Turkey. The violence and assassinations of black leaders in the United States during the politically turbulent 1960s took an emotional toll on him. After the assassination of his three friends—Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968—Baldwin suffered an emotional breakdown, became ill, and eventually moved to the South of France to recuperate. In 1971, he settled in a house in the village of St. Paul de Vence, which he would later buy piece by piece, as he received payments for his publications (accounts vary as to the final sale having taken place). In St. Paul, he would create his most enduring household.