![]() Nonetheless, although France remained his permanent residence, Mr. Baldwin had moved to France in the late 1940's to escape what he felt was the stifling racial bigotry of America. ''I would place him very high among writers,'' Benjamin DeMott, professor of English at Amherst College, said yesterday, ''in part because his work showed a powerful commitment to the right values and had a profound impact Baldwin as ''one of the most important American essayists, black or white.'' The novelist Ralph Ellison said yesterday, ''America has lost one of its most gifted writers'' and praised Mr. Order to protect himself, closes his eyes, compulsively repeats his crimes, and enters a spiritual darkness which no one can describe.'' ''What is ghastly and really almost hopeless in our racial situation now is that the crimes we have committed are so great and so unspeakable that the acceptance of this knowledge would lead, literally, to madness. In the preface to his 1964 play, ''Blues for Mister Charlie,'' noting that the work had been inspired ''very distantly'' by the 1955 murder of a black youth, Emmett Till, in Mississippi, Mr. Yet distanced sense of advocacy, seemed perfect for a period in which blacks in the South lived under continual threat of racial violence and in which civil-rights workers faced brutal beatings and even death. Baldwin's prose, with its apocalyptic tone - a legacy of his early exposure to religious fundamentalism - and its passionate Some critics later said his language was sometimes too elliptical, his indictments sometimes too sweeping. The civil-rights movement was exploding across the American South. Baldwin published his three most important collections of essays -''Notes of a Native Son'' (1955), ''Nobody Knows My Name'' (1961) and ''The Fire Next Time'' (1963) - during the years when But it is his essays that arguably constitute his most substantial contribution to literature. Baldwin saw himself primarily as a novelist. He was 63 years old.Īt least in the early years of his career, Mr. James Baldwin, whose passionate, intensely personal essays in the 1950's and 60's on racial discrimination in America made him an eloquent voice of the civil-rights movement, died of stomach cancer early yesterday at his home in St. ![]() ![]() ![]() We’re glad he sought us out, and we’re pleased he’s coming aboard.James Baldwin, Eloquent Writer In Behalf of Civil Rights, Is Deadĭecember 2, 1987, Wednesday, Late City Final Edition For us, he’s an editor made to order - highly skilled and enthusiastic about the work we do. His interests are wide-ranging, his story-shaping editing talents are manifold, and his news judgment is spot on - precisely the kind of editor Obits values, with our mandate to range widely and dig deeply into recording the deaths and profiling the lives of people from all walks of life - from business titans to nuclear physicists to Hall of Famers to ballerinas. He did it all for the International desk, including serving as weekend editor and deputy Asia editor in Hong Kong and editing multiple prize-winning projects.įor the Obits desk, choosing him to join us was an easy call. As his colleagues on the International desk made clear in a farewell message the other day, Herbert has been one of its most accomplished and impactful editors, owning most recently, as they put it, “one of the hottest seats in the newsroom” - overseeing Middle East coverage. The Obituaries desk is pleased to welcome Herbert Buchsbaum into its editing ranks in the coming weeks (the precise date to be announced).
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