Our cultural and literary icons begin life like all mere mortals do—as individuals idiosyncratically developing their artistic lives—burgeoning, determined, diligent, (or perhaps diligence comes later), in any case, all great writers develop at some point a quality of being unflinching, forging their art in the fires of life’s most varied concatenations. James Baldwin is one such icon, a storyteller and social thinker who published widely, traveled meaningfully, and articulated himself into American legend: a novelist, essayist, political commentator and activist, a public thinker, and a moral beacon. America and the world are poorer for his absence. But his acerbic lyricism survives—in polemics, in criticism, in tender prose—and for that, we are the perennial benefactors.

Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, in 1924. His childhood was filled with family responsibility and religious obligation, as he was one of ten children and his stepfather was an evangelical preacher. His first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, is a semi-autobiographical tour de force that details his life before age 17, exposing the patterns and environments that shaped his thinking, and the book heavily explores the relationship between himself, his stepfather, and religion.

He moved down to Greenwich village for an apprenticeship and soon after moved across the sea to Paris, France, spending a good portion of his adult life traveling between Europe and the United States. It is said that one has to leave home in order to truly understand it. The move to Paris was for Baldwin a key moment in both his personal life and in his burgeoning literary career. À Paris, je me suis trouvé. In Paris, I find myself. Indeed, it was from the city of lights that he penned and published Go Tell it on the Mountain, and many other books to follow.

Baldwin is one of the signal intellectuals of the Civil Rights movement, both as a firebrand essayist, a public explainer, and as an activity. A series of essay collections and book length nonfiction emerged from his corpus during this time, including, Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and his most well-known collection of essays, The Fire Next Time, which is comprised of two long pieces. Baldwin also wrote about love and sexuality and his own romances with both men and women. In Giovanni’s Room (1956), the main character loves both a man and a woman, and his later novel Another Country (1962), explores gay sexuality as well as interracial love, but though these works have social issues at their center, they are primarily beautifully-rendered, thoughtful, stylized, and insightful novels. Baldwin continued writing until his death in 1987, producing a slew of works in his final decade. He is often regarded as one of the most influential authors of the Civil Rights movement, and we should add to that understanding one of the great American writers and moral voices of the twentieth century. His works have a pressing urgency that continue to be just as relevant in the present day as they were when written.