James Baldwin

August 2, 1924 (101 years old)

Place of Birth: Harlem, New York, USA

Biography

James Arthur Baldwin was an African-American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son, explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions.