Few authors have shaped political and cultural discourse as elegantly or unflinchingly as James Baldwin. Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, he emerged in the ’60s as a searing critic of the conditions of black people in the United States. Jim Crow laws in the South dictated terms of segregation; the epidemics of lynching and state-sanctioned violence terrorized black communities throughout the region. And as black families migrated to northern cities in hopes of reaching equity and justice, they were met with a host of de fac- to policies that limited access to secure housing, jobs and full livelihoods.

“The American soil is full of corpses of my ancestors, through 400 years and at least three wars,” Baldwin asserted during a 1965 debate against William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University. “Why is my freedom, my citizenship, in question now? What one begs American people to do, for all sakes, is simply to accept our history.” His writings were indictments of a political system that had consistently rendered black Americans second-class citizens.

It was his first collection of essays, Notes of A Native Son, published in 1955, that truly ushered Baldwin into national prominence. The collection traversed the realms of literary criticism, political theory and memoir, as Baldwin addressed the consequences of racism in a country he regarded as existing in severe moral decay. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin casts Bigger Thomas, the central protagonist of Richard Wright’s acclaimed novel Native Son, as nothing more than a caricature of an angry black man. In “Encounter on the Seine,” Baldwin recounts his interactions with Africans living in France and presents a poignant comparison to the ways in which blackness operates in France, Baldwin’s longtime home, and the United States, his birthplace. What permeates this first collection is a biographical inquiry rooted in a critical analysis of race, a reconciliation to which he returns repeatedly.

James Arthur Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem, New York, and came of age in a neighborhood that teemed with an “…insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a room with all the windows shut,” as he described in the essay “The Harlem Ghetto.” Baldwin considered the conditions of Harlem to be the direct result of the material consequences of institutionalized racism: housing discrimination, lack of jobs, poverty. Baldwin’s home life was largely informed by the influence of his stepfather, a preacher, with whom he had a tenuous relationship. In fact, for a short while, Baldwin himself was a preacher. But, it was the classroom that offered the greatest solace, and it was as a student that Baldwin began to nurture and develop his love of writing. By the time his stepfather died in 1943, the 19-year-old Baldwin had committed fully to the pursuit of writing, leaving Harlem for Greenwich Village. It was there he met fellow author Richard Wright and painter Beauford Delaney, who served as guides for a young Baldwin navigating the downtown scene.

Despite being embraced by a community of like minds, Baldwin was disillusioned by the pervasiveness of prejudice in the United States. And so he left for Paris in 1948, arriving in the city with just $40 in his pocket. Baldwin’s departure from his homeland was, quite literally, a matter of life and death. In a 1984 interview with Jordan Elgrably of The Paris Review, he put it this way: “My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed. My best friend had committed suicide two years earlier, jumping off the George Washington Bridge.” Later in the interview, he is even more explicit: “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France—it was a matter of getting out of America. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York. If I had stayed there, I would have gone under, like my friend on the George Washington Bridge.”

In France, Baldwin joined a growing cohort of black American expat artists who viewed their self-exile as a means of escaping the physical and psychological trappings of a country that refused to recognize the fullness of their humanity. He spent time in Switzerland and Turkey before returning to the US in 1957, but his transatlantic reckoning never formally ended. France remained a haven throughout his life.

Once back in the US, Baldwin became deeply embedded in the civil rights movement, traveling throughout the South to cities such as Birmingham, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi to chronicle the injustices of codified disenfranchisement. He befriended and supported leaders like Malcolm X and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and found himself heralded as a voice equally as urgent as theirs in the midst of a black liberation struggle. “It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country,” he writes in his seminal nonfiction work, The Fire Next Time, “for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.”

Indeed, unrelenting in his love for his people, unyielding in his commitment to justice, Baldwin used his pen as a tool for truth-telling, producing more than 18 works of nonfiction, fiction, poetry and screenplays. He never saw himself as a revolutionary leader. Instead, he thought of himself, as he once told filmmaker Sedat Pakay, as a witness; there was potency in his looking, his observations and his proclamations.