James Baldwin’s Apotheosis - 3 Quarks Daily

James Baldwin’s Apotheosis - 3 Quarks Daily

Brooke Allen in The Hudson Review: The last time I wrote about James Baldwin, in the late 1990s, I concluded that his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was his best, and that his second, Giovanni’s Room, was sentimental, artificial, and populated by stock figures—in fact I agreed with Norman Mailer’s assessment that the novel, dealing openly in Eisenhower’s America with homosexuality, was “brave” but “bad.” Now hailed as a seminal work, i…