Baldwin’s essays exemplify and precursor many of the elements and arguments central to the Civil Rights movement. He has fashioned his plea to America out of the past he has know, from the ferment of the present and the possibilities of the future. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time(1963) comprises two autobiographical essays in which the author confronts the racial issues and tensions that he believes corrupt and deform American life and the American dream. Thus he has written from a heart which has felt a unique kind of hurt and a brain which has desperately sought hope in face of what often seems to be the merciless logic of despair.
‘The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it,’ he writes. But he has not written this book of two essays to please. What he has drawn will not sit well with even some whites who count themselves as friends of the Negro. He has pictured white America as seen through the eyes of a Negro. Baldwin has fashioned such a transformation. Out of his own pain and despair and hope, Mr. The listener can be transformed, as far as words will take him, into the skin or the teller. On another and higher level, it can be related so the listener becomes virtually part of the experience, intensely feels the hurt and pain and despair, and yes, even the hope.
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