5 - James Baldwin and the Popular Reviews

Summary

OVER THE COURSE OF his long and prolific career, James Baldwin published twenty-two full-length works (in addition to numerous essays, short stories, and interviews). With only a couple of exceptions, all the works were reviewed widely in mainstream, high-circulation magazines, newspapers, and journals, though they were not all well received. Though this study has considered the critical reception of Baldwin's work, and thus has focused on critical reviews and articles in academic and scholarly publications, no such study would be complete without a consideration of popular press reviews. The reasons are twofold.

First, many critical articles, especially at the height of Baldwin's popularity (1963–73), are in conversation, either directly or indirectly, with popular press reviews and Baldwin's popular reputation. Whether critics are debating the merits of a best-selling novel (Another Country), or a poorly reviewed play (Blues for Mister Charlie), or resuscitating neglected aspects of a work (the homoeroticism of Go Tell It on the Mountain, for instance), or simply responding to what has been said (Addison Gayle responding to the critics of The Fire Next Time), popular reviews shape much of the critical response to Baldwin's work.

More important, however, confining ourselves to academic criticism means that we confine ourselves to Baldwin's “canon,” namely, the five works most often discussed in criticism: Notes of a Native Son, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and The Fire Next Time. This seems to me a disservice to Baldwin's body of work, since the last work in the “canon,” The Fire Next Time, was published in 1963, while his last full-length book was published in 1985. In those intervening years Baldwin published sixteen other full-length works, including several novels, two plays, a collection of poetry, a screenplay, and a children's book. Our best and often only sense of how these works were received comes from reading the reviews in the popular press.

Not surprisingly, we see in these reviews a reception trajectory similar to that in the critical articles—a period of adoration followed by periods of varying levels of disappointment and frustration. And much like the critical articles, Baldwin's reception in these reviews often seems to have little to do with him or his work.