i was stupidly lucky in my last year of college to have taken a seminar that covered four of baldwin's major essay collections: notes of a native son (1955), nobody knows my name (1961), the fire next time (1963), and no name in the street (1972), all available in the volume of his collected essays edited by toni morrison.
maybe this is overly sentimental, but i think baldwin taught me what it means to be an honest person and a good writer, the two great aspirations he adopts in his first book. he also taught me what it means to be a compassionate but unsparing social and political critic of american modernity.
reading baldwin was the first time i've ever felt truly at home in a text. few other works have affected me like his.
