SOURCE: "The Enemy Within: The Making and Unmaking of James Baldwin," in New Yorker, February 16, 1998, pp. 72-80.

In the following review, Als presents an overview of Baldwin's life and career.

Twenty-two years ago, when I was fourteen, I was given James Baldwin's second collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), by his friend and my mentor the writer Owen Dodson, who was one of the more ebullient survivors of the Harlem Renaissance. The dust jacket of the book featured a photograph of Baldwin wearing a white T-shirt and standing in a pile of rubble in a vacant lot. It was this photograph that compelled me to read the book. I had never seen an image of a black boy like me—Baldwin looked as if he could have been posing in my old neighborhood, in East New York—gracing anything as impressive as a collection of essays. In...