James Baldwin : Collected Essays : Notes of a Native Son/Nobody Knows My Name/The Fire Next Time/No Name in the Street/The Devil Finds Work/Other Essays (Library of America) Hardcover – February 1, 1998 by James Baldwin (Author), Toni Morrison (Editor) (Library of America)

Throughout his career as a novelist and playwright, James Baldwin was a prolific essay writer. His five major published collections of essays, including The Fire Next Time, are printed here together with an additional 36 essays not published in any collection before this volume.

Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name were two early collections which were autobiographical in nature. However, these essays reveal Baldwin only as a political, social, and cultural critic; he reveals very little of himself as a living, breathing human being.

In The Fire Next Time, one of Baldwin's most celebrated works, he continues his political, social, and cultural criticism, but the shades are drawn back slightly so that we are able to capture glimpses of the man behind these essays. He returns to the pattern established with his first two essay collections with No Name in the Street. The Devil Finds Work is an odd work of film criticism that stands in stark contrast to his other collections.

The editor, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, assembles an excellent collection of essays for the final section of the book. Not all essays are equal in quality, but Baldwin's essay on Martin Luther King is particularly noteworthy.

I had begun to fear that Baldwin spoke only of his political, social, and cultural views in his essays, and avoided anything that might reveal his personal life and feelings. Fortunately, Baldwin's full character breaks through in the final three essays, giving us a fuller portrait of a well rounded life. These three essays are perhaps the finest included in this collection, thus showing the value of slogging through every one of the 842 pages that make up this text.

The volume is almost but not quite comprehensive. The chronology appended to the end of the body of the text makes tantalizing references to essays I would have liked to have read. My guess is that rights issues prevented those essays from being included in this book. Nevertheless, this is an outstanding work which gives deep insight into one of the leading writers of the 20th century.