Notes of a Native Son

'A classic ... Take the words out of the 1950s, when they were published, and they could apply to the women in pink hats, the scientists, the Black Lives Matter activists, the climate-change believers and the LGBTQ-rights supporters who have flooded the streets of Washington this year' Washington PostWritten during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America - from life in Harlem, to the protest novel, movies, and the experience of African Americans abroad - and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic. This book inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century and it is the book that established Baldwin's voice as a social critic. In an age of Black Lives Matter, Baldwin's essays are as powerful today as when they were first written.