James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey

Rating:
Summary: excellent & insightful academic book
Review: It's great to see Baldwin's later novels finally being given the scholarly attention they deserve. To me Just Above My Head is his masterpiece, but is often disparaged by critics. By contrast, while I'd always thought If Beale Street Could Talk was an artistic failure, this well-written and attentive work has made me want to reread & reconsider it. Lynn Scott is a perceptive critic, & shrewd at analysing the critical context in which each novel first appeared. She makes one particular point, which is that Baldwin's essays were always better-received than his novels because the essays barely mention homosexuality, whereas in the novels it is often present as a key theme, & invested with humanising & redemptive potential.

Rating:
Summary: excellent & insightful academic book
Review: It's great to see Baldwin's later novels finally being given the scholarly attention they deserve. To me Just Above My Head is his masterpiece, but is often disparaged by critics. By contrast, while I'd always thought If Beale Street Could Talk was an artistic failure, this well-written and attentive work has made me want to reread & reconsider it. Lynn Scott is a perceptive critic, & shrewd at analysing the critical context in which each novel first appeared. She makes one particular point, which is that Baldwin's essays were always better-received than his novels because the essays barely mention homosexuality, whereas in the novels it is often present as a key theme, & invested with humanising & redemptive potential.

Rating:
Summary: A tour de force literary analysis
Review: James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness To The Journey by Lynn Orilla Scott (Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of American Thought and Language, Michigan State University) is a tour de force literary analysis of one of the great African American authors of the twentieth century. Close readings and a thoughtful study of Baldwin's "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone," "If Beale Street Could Talk," and "Just Above My Head" compose this literary analysis and commentary that examines how African-American artists and writers have fought to change how race, sex, and gender are represented (and sometimes stereotyped) in American popular culture. James Baldwin's Later Fiction is highly recommended for its solid focus on James Baldwin, who as an African-American writer, reflected and incorporated the upheavals in society as reflected in the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s.