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James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, and educated in New York.
His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to
excellent reviews and immediately was recognized as establishing
a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. "Mountain
is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything
else," he remarked. Baldwin's play The Amen Corner was first
performed at Howard University in 1955 (it was staged commercially
in the 1960s), and his acclaimed collection of essays Notes of a
Native Son, was published the same year. A second collection of
essays, Nobody Knows My Name, was published in 1961 between his
novels Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1961). More...