Baldwin Dies at 63; Writer Explored Black Experience
Baldwin Dies at 63; Writer Explored Black Experience
Baldwin Dies at 63; Writer Explored Black Experience
Baldwin Dies at 63; Writer Explored Black Experience
Baldwin Dies at 63; Writer Explored Black Experience
December 2, 1987
December 1987
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...
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