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4,334 words · no email, no account
No. 052 · Letters & Ideas · Literature
The Saint-Paul-De-Vence House
a biography of James Arthur Baldwin
What the book is
He was fourteen when he climbed into the pulpit of a Harlem storefront church, and twenty-four when he boarded a one-way passage to Paris with forty dollars in his pocket. Between those two thresholds, and in the four decades that followed, James Baldwin became the most morally exacting witness American letters has ever produced — and the most surveilled.
Calvin Renard follows Baldwin from the tenements of his stepfather's terrified faith through the cafés of Saint-Germain, from the bus stations of the segregated South to the talk-show studios where he sparred with Buckley and the FBI agents who logged his every movement across two continents. Here are the four landmark books written before he turned forty, and here too is the longer second life: the years when Black Power found him insufficient, when the white liberal press found him exhausted, when he kept writing anyway from a stone house in the south of France.
Drawing on the Bureau file, the unpublished correspondence, and the testimony of those who loved and quarreled with him, Renard asks what it cost a man to be, simultaneously, a Black writer, a queer writer, an exile, and a believer who had stopped believing — and what it means that a country which could not hear him in 1968 has chosen, at last, to listen.
A life of the witness, and of the country that required one.
At a glance
- Subject
- James Arthur Baldwin
- Shelf
- Letters & Ideas · Literature
- Written by
- Calvin Renard
- Chapters
- 18 across 189 pages
- Narrated by
- Imogen Vey
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The MeetingRead free
- 02The Stepfather3,473 words
- 03The Boy Preacher2,917 words
- 04DeWitt Clinton3,719 words
- 05The Departure3,312 words
- 06Go Tell It on the Mountain2,745 words
- 07Giovanni's Room2,848 words
- 08Notes of a Native Son4,237 words
- 09The Return2,677 words
- 10The Fire Next Time3,558 words
- 11Birmingham, the March, Dallas2,826 words
- 12Another Country and Blues for Mister Charlie4,120 words
- 13Soul on Ice2,660 words
- 14The White Literary Establishment Turns2,530 words
- 15No Name in the Street and If Beale Street Could Talk3,505 words
- 16Turkey, France, the Wandering Years3,755 words
- 17Remember This House2,863 words
- 18December 1, 19873,644 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 189 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 189 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-035-5 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Imogen Vey
ISBN 979-8-90623-016-4
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Saint-Paul-De-Vence House about?
James Arthur Baldwin. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Saint-Paul-De-Vence House — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,334 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 189 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
