James Baldwin

He preached his first sermon at fourteen in a storefront Harlem church, several years before he decided the pulpit's fire could serve fiction better than faith. In 1948, twenty-four and broke, he sailed for Paris on a one-way ticket, escaping what he called the trap of being seen only as a problem before he learned to see America whole from a distance.

His early mentor Richard Wright never forgave the essay in which Baldwin turned against protest fiction itself; the break was permanent. His publisher, meanwhile, balked at the manuscript of Giovanni's Room, a love story between two men, and urged him to set it aside. He held firm and found another house willing to print it.

The 1963 essay collection The Fire Next Time made him a central voice of the civil rights movement; he died of stomach cancer in 1987 at his home in the south of France.