Going to Meet the Man

Eight stories. Each one a different window into the experience of Black Americans in the mid-twentieth century. Together they form one of the most searching and courageous short story collections in American literature — the only one James Baldwin ever published, and a book of astonishing moral and artistic ambition.

The collection’s title story is one of the great short fictions of the twentieth century. In it, Baldwin enters the consciousness of a white Southern deputy on the night of a civil rights demonstration — a man performing his violence with the half-awareness of someone acting out a script he did not write and cannot escape — and what Baldwin does with that consciousness is one of literature’s most audacious acts of empathy. To read it is to understand something you did not understand before.

The other seven stories — set in Harlem, in a jazz club, in a European city, in the world of Black American religious life — are each extraordinary in their own way. Vonnegut said that the first casualty of war is truth. Baldwin would have added: and the first casualty of racism is the humanity of the racist. This book proves it. Published by Penguin.