James baldwin cause of death

In 1944, Baldwin met Richard Wright, who was the famous African American male writer at the time, and whose work spoke to his sensibility. In time, Wright would also become his mentor, for Baldwin appreciated Wright’s strong opinions about race in America, and he also greatly valued their intellectual exchanges. Wright helped Baldwin to obtain a fellowship to write his first novel, which enabled him to leave for Paris in 1948, where the older writer had relocated a few years earlier. However, while in France, the two were often at odds about the ways in which they approached race in their writings. Baldwin wrote three essays explicating his critique of Wright’s “protest art” in the novel Native Son (1940); their disagreement eventually led to the demise of their friendship, which Baldwin regretted after Wright’s death in 1960.

In 1948, at age twenty-four, Baldwin left the United States to live in Paris, France, as he could not tolerate the racial and sexual discrimination he experienced daily. As Kendall Thomas, professor of law and critical race studies at Columbia University,

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