James Baldwin, a renowned writer who spent a lifetime in literature trying to explore his identity as a black and as an American, died Monday night at the age of 63 in his home in St. Paul de Vence in the south of France. His death from cancer was announced Tuesday morning by Bernard Hassalle, a longtime companion and secretary. The eldest son of a Harlem preacher, Baldwin, a small, slight man, was looked on for much of two decades both as a distinguished young American novelist and as a black essayist with the extraordinary, almost uncanny power of making his black experience meaningful to a white audience. But, after the 1950s and 1960s, his reputation waned, perhaps because he had become too strident a black for white audiences, perhaps because he failed, like other American novelists of the 20th Century, to maintain the excitement and freshness of his earlier work...

For many years Howard Fast the Communist obscured our view of Howard Fast the writer. Flaunting contempt at Congress, issuing tracts against "bourgeois, decadent" authors, rallying sympathy for the Soviet Union, he stood between us and his books and kept us from a special insight into the intellect of an American Communist. Fast, who has left the party, may have represented, in some ways, the essence of America's own brand of communism. The clues to understanding him as a Communist lie in understanding him as a writer. Fast's novels had tremendous circulation in the Communist world after World War II and, in fact, enjoyed much popularity here until the press advertised his link with the Communist Party in the late 1940s. His Soviet popularity ended when he left the party in 1957. Although his resignation helped reopen doors to American publishers and movie producers, most of the fiction of his Communist period has remained unread here. We have slipped Fast into our stereotype of the ex-Communist and perfunctorily welcomed him as one more defector who finally has seen the light...