The Fire Next Time

The landmark work on race in America from James Baldwin, whose life and words are immortalized in the Oscar-nominated film I Am Not Your Negro We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation James Baldwins impassioned plea to end the racial nightmare in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal letters, the Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwins early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice. Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle . . . all presented in searing, brilliant prose the New York Times Book Review Baldwin writes with great passion . . . it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy Sunday Times the great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement . . . his seminal work Guardian