Another Country Study Guide

James Baldwin was born as James Arthur Jones to a single mother in Harlem, New York. Three years after Baldwin’s birth, his mother married David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher, who acted as a father figure for Baldwin. Baldwin had a difficult relationship with his stepfather growing up because his stepfather did not like that he had white friends, and was more interested in reading and film growing up than anything else. Baldwin’s education came from a mixture of public school and church. At a relatively young age, Baldwin delivered sermons at his stepfather’s church. Baldwin did well in school and always had a passion for reading and writing. However, in high school, he felt increasingly alienated from his peers when he discovered he was attracted to men instead of women. After he finished school, Baldwin spent time picking up various jobs to support his family. In the late 1940s, Baldwin became connected with a number of well-known modernist painters and writers in New York, who helped him grow his literary talent. Baldwin began by writing essays and reviews, and he eventually published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1953. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Baldwin was one of America’s premier public intellectuals. Not only did critics and audiences think he was a great literary talent, but he was active in the Civil Rights Movement as well and often wrote non-fiction works to discuss the United States’ problems with race. Baldwin’s most famous works are his novels Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, as well as his essay collection Notes of a Native Son. Since his death in 1987, Baldwin’s reputation as one of the literary giants in American history has only expanded.

Baldwin published Another Country three years before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery. At the time, racial tensions were high in the United States. Tensions were especially high in the South where authorities were still enforcing Jim Crow laws (which upheld racial segregation). However, as Another Country shows, plenty of racial discrimination was still occurring in the North as well, even in the most liberal areas of New York City. Part of the cultural shift that Baldwin’s novel tries to depict is the realization of liberal white people that, despite their liberal views and vocal allyship, there are parts of the Black experience that they do not understand. Similarly, Another Country also foregrounds queer relationships and the unfair treatment non-heterosexual people faced in American society. In 1962, same-sex intercourse was illegal in nearly every state of the country. Same-sex marriage would not become fully legal in the United States until 2015.

Baldwin’s Another Country is often read as a response to Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro.” In the essay, Mailer praises aspects of Black culture, which he views as rebellious, interesting, and necessary. However, critics like Baldwin argued that in doing so, Mailer perpetuated negative myths and stereotypes about Black people, and Black male sexuality in particular. In 1961, Baldwin published a response to Mailer’s essay titled “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” in which he dismantles Mailer’s understanding of the relationship between Black culture and white culture. One year later, Baldwin published Another Country, which deals with similar themes and issues. Baldwin’s novels, including Go Tell It on the Mountain, If Beale Street Could Talk, and The Fire Next Time, portray characters from a variety of backgrounds who struggle to understand the world from one another’s perspectives. Baldwin’s work is also typically read in relation to other prominent works by Black writers who were working around the time of the Civil Rights Movement such as Martin Luther King, Jr. (Letter from Birmingham Jail), Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X), and Langston Hughes (“I, Too”; Montage of a Dream Deferred). Although Baldwin admired King, he felt that King’s presentation of Black culture to the white public was too one-note. With Another Country, Baldwin wanted to represent deeper and often more problematic relationships within the Black community, while also expressing the rage Black people felt from oppression.