A major hardcover compendium of nonfiction by one of America's most brilliant essayists, timed to the celebration of his centenary Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual James Baldwin is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This Everyman's Library collection includes his bestselling, galvanizing essay The Fire Next Time— which gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s and still lights the way to understanding race in America today—along with three additional brilliant works of nonfiction by this seminal chronicler and analyst of culture. From No Name In the Street 's extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies to the "passionate, probing, controversial" ( The Atlantic ) Nobody Knows My Name and the incisive criticism of American movies in The Devil Finds Work , Baldwin's stunning prose over and over proves relevant to our contemporary struggle for equality, justice, and social change. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times. "If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one." —Michael Ondaatje   "The best essayist in this country—a man whose power has always been in his reasoned, biting sarcasm; his insistence on removing layer by layer the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country." — The New York Times Book Review   "[ The Fire Next Time is] basically the finest essay I’ve ever read. . . . Baldwin refused to hold anyone’s hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you." —Ta-Nehisi Coates   “More eloquent than W. E. B. DuBois, more penetrating than Richard Wright. . . . [ No Name in the Street ] contains truth that cannot be denied.” — The Atlantic   “Characteristically beautiful.... He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being—which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer.” — The Nation “These essays are, at once, intimate and expansive, vulnerable and relentless in their demands of the reader. They challenge and upset.  Something close to the heart is happening on the page.” —from the introduction by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were best sellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. EDDIE S. GLAUDE, JR. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy in Black and Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. He is a contributor to the MSNBC cable news channel and frequently appears as a commentator on the Morning Joe and Deadline: White House programs. from the introduction by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. In 1986, about a year before his death, James Baldwin sat down with David C. Estes for the New Orleans Review to talk about his latest book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen . It was a wide-ranging interview, a kind of retrospective of Baldwin’s career as a writer and a refl ection, in light of the new book, on his career as an essayist. It is in the context of this discussion that the question of how he became an essayist emerged. How did he think about the form? How did he see himself as someone who inhabited the genre at the highest level? After all, at this point in his career Baldwin had stood for some time as one of America’s greatest essayists. In his non-fi ction writing, particularly in the books collected here, Baldwin offered the most searing and insightful commentary on the vital questions of race, culture, and American democracy. His prose gave the nation a language in which to think about itself differently, loosed from the shackles of ideas of American exceptionalism and the illusions of whiteness that led some to believe that somehow, no matter what God said, the color of one’s skin accorded one value above or below every other human being. On the page, he forced a confrontation with the ugliness of who we are, and he did it in such a way that might have made Montaigne nod his head in recognition. Simply put, Baldwin had mastered the form. In this intervi