An Early Biography Of James Baldwin

James Baldwin is one of my all-time favorite writers. I can never read enough by or about him. So I was delighted to find sitting on a public library shelf a copy of The Furious Passage of James Baldwin by Fern Marja Eckman. The book was originally published in 1966. It has been referred to in later biographies of Baldwin but I was never able to obtain a copy until now. The new edition was published in 2014.

The back jacket copy states that Eckman, who at the time was a reporter for the then liberal New York Post, "based this book on hours and hours of taped interviews with Baldwin and with the people who are significant in his story" and is "a profile told largely in his own words."

Because this biography was the first one written on Baldwin, his later years, covered in subsequent books, are missing. But nevertheless it gives readers an insight into Baldwin's early life, writing career, and personality. (The first few pages of the biography seem to be psychoanalyzing Baldwin and his rocky relationship with his stepfather.) At this writing, I am still reading the book which is riveting, although it reads more like a memoir than a standard biography.