James Baldwin was a key figure of the civil rights movement, as well as an essayist, novelist, playwright, and poet. He is known for his work’s social criticism and its role exposing truths about racism and anti-gay bias in America. He was born August 2, 1924, in New York City, the oldest of nine children. Baldwin and his siblings grew up in poverty in Harlem, an upbringing that not only heightened his observational skills but also his ability to provide honest and heartfelt commentary on social class in America. While attending Frederick Douglass Junior High School, one of his teachers and mentors was Countee Cullen, who was also a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. With this kind of tutelage, Baldwin began to write and edit for the local school literary magazine called Magpie (“An Introduction to James Baldwin.” National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian).

Though he was never a teacher in an official capacity, he spent his formative years (between age 14 and 17) as a preacher at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. Preaching helped him develop an idiosyncratic rhetorical style that blended reflection, revitalization, and activism, and infused his writing with biblical and mythological metaphors, allusions, themes, and symbols.