James Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin was born the first of nine children during 1924 in Harlem. His father, David, was a clergyman and a factory worker, and was the source of all of James Baldwin's fears. Baldwin's mother, Berdis, was a homemaker. Baldwin first started writing around age fourteen as a way of seeking the love which he was missing from his family life. During this time Baldwin attended Frederick Douglas Junior High School and DeWitt Clinton High School. During his school years, Baldwin won several awards for his writings. The joy that he felt from having others praise his work was overshadowed, however, by his father's disapproval of his non-Christian-oriented writing.

Baldwin in a microcosm "Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced." - James Baldwin Racism has been a part of American and world history for centuries, and has become a pattern in cultures. James Baldwin was an African-American author who, like many black men and women, struggled against the inherent hate/racism in America. Baldwin had the opportunity to travel to a microcosmic Swiss village atop a mountain.

His story of the native's curiosity towards him and eventually fondness challenges the idea that racism is quickly overtaking the world. A microcosm, by definition is a representation of something on a smaller scale. In the Renaissance age, philosophers considered the world to be a macrocosm hosting millions of individual microcosms: people. The term microcosm signifies the creation of the human being as a complete world. In contrast, macrocosm refers to the idea of the whole universe outside humanity. This idea that an individual person is a world unto himself, surely influenced Baldwin in the writing of his essay pertaining to the small Swiss village that was "virtually unknown" (124). The village that Baldwin verbosely writes about is not specified although he tells us that the warm springs are a tourist draw and that the village is "only four hours from Milan and three hours from Lausanne" (124), but this gives the reader little nformation about the city. The imagery that forms while reading the passage comes directly from the population of the village. The men, women, and children, are all astounded by Baldwin's skin color and hair texture.

James Baldwin's father was a very religious Christian who forced the church on young James. For a few years (from ages fourteen through seventeen), Baldwin was even a preacher. It was the bittersweet beauty of the church which Baldwin said turned him into a writer. Those few years of lost herding opened James Baldwins' eyes to the fact that he was in need of soul searching. Those years would not be in vain; the cadences of black religious rituals sound throughout his writings. Baldwin was also known to credit his years at the pulpit for morphing him into the writer he was to become.

Today few would argue that James Baldwin is an inspirational African American writer. But this was not always the case. Baldwin, like many ...