The Fire Next Time (Twentieth Century Classics)

Paperback, 96 pages

English language

Published Jan. 25, 1990 by Penguin Books Ltd.

ISBN:
978-0-14-018275-0
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5 stars (1 review)

From Amazon.com:

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

20 editions

The Fire Next Time

5 stars

1) "Dear James: I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody—with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy."

2) "Just before and then during the Second World War, many of my friends fled into the service, all to be changed …

Subjects

  • Classic fiction
  • Modern fiction
  • Novels, other prose & writers
  • American English
  • Fiction