All the grief, grit, and unassailable dignity of the civil rights movement are evoked in this illustrated edition of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, with photographs by Steve Schapiro. Together, Baldwin’s frank account of the black experience and Schapiro’s vital images offer poetic and potent testimony to one of the most important struggles of American society.

James Baldwin
James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the postwar era. His nonfiction collections, most notably Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), and novels, including Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in mid-20th-century America. A Harlem, New York, native, he primarily made his home in the south of France.

Steve Schapiro
American photojournalist Steve Schapiro has documented six decades of American culture, from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy to Andy Warhol’s Factory and the filming of The Godfather trilogy. He has published a dozen books of his photographs, has exhibited his work in shows from Los Angeles to Moscow, and is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, among others.

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