Another
Country by James
A. Baldwin
Woven into the pattern of
violence that exists in racial bigotry is a theme that is gentle,
wistful, and poetic--Baldwin's apologia for homosexual love.
Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France,
among other locales, Another Country is a novel of
passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning
for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men
and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender
and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In
a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst
intentions of liberal America in the early 1970s.
Novel by James Baldwin, published in 1962. The
novel is renowned for its graphic portrayal of bisexuality and
interracial relations. Shortly after the action begins, Rufus
Scott, a black jazz musician, commits suicide, impelling his
friends to search for the meaning of his death and, consequently,
for a deeper understanding of their own identities. Employing a
loose, episodic structure, this work traces the
affairs--heterosexual and homosexual as well as interracial--among
Scott's friends. In its language and structure, the novel is a
departure from Baldwin's earlier work. -- The
Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
"An almost unbearable, tumultuous,
blood-pounding experience" --Washington Post
"Brilliantly and fiercely told." --The
New York Times
About the Author
James Baldwin was born in 1924 and educated in
New York. The author of over twenty works of fiction and
non-fiction, Baldwin received numerous accolades, including a
Guggenheim Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Grant. In 1986 he was
made a Commander of the Legion of Honor. He died in 1987.
