James Baldwin-the legacy

n the four decades of his writing career, James Baldwin made an extraordinarily prolific and wide-ranging contribution to American letters. He published six novels, a collection of short stories, two plays, a screenplay about the life of Malcolm X that later became one of the bases for the Spike Lee film, a volume of poems, two book-length dialogues (one with anthropologist Margaret Mead, the other with poet Nikki Giovanni), a short book (part autobiographically-based and part sociologically-based) about American movies, a long essay on a series of murders of young African-American children in Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1980s, and five other volumes of essays and nonfiction. His early novels, especially the first two—Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room—excited substantial notice and critical acclaim, and they continue to hold their reputations, but there is a strong body of opinion to the effect that it is in Baldwin's nonfiction writings that his greatest and most enduring work is to be found.