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James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (Dial Press, 1961) Reissued by Vintage in paperback in 1993. James Baldwin left segregated America for Europe to escape the volatile climate of race relations in the U.S. He eventually came to find that his identity as a black man was inescapably linked to his identity as an American. The essays that make up Nobody Knows My Name are a reflection of that realization. Baldwin expounds on the American identity as well as complex themes like racism, colonialism, and the ghettoization of urban blacks. In all of his essays, Baldwin places himself in the midst of the action – a conference on the future of Africa, a trip to the South, a walk around the old neighborhood in Harlem, a profile of Norman Mailer, and a eulogy of sorts to Richard Wright. Within those individual essays, Baldwin revisits the large themes that persist in his work by intimately relating them to his various subjects. A trip to his childhood block in Harlem becomes a piece about ghettos as symbols of institutionalized racism and how black folks view white folks and the general feelings of bitterness about the empty promise of public housing. In a 1961 book review for the New York Times, Charles Poore wrote that Baldwin "can do very difficult things with words." He can be subtly humorous, succinct, and authoritative. He can also be verbose and conceited. But, as a collection, the essays of Nobody Knows My Name work well to examine the same themes through different looking glasses. Though Baldwin called Nobody Knows My Name a "private log," many of its entries were published separately in Esquire, Harper's, The New Leader, and the New York Times Magazine. It remains a hallmark book for scholars and writers. MORE: Notes on Baldwin’s Collected Essays In Harper's, conservative intellectual Shelby Steele evaluates Baldwin as an activist writer |
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