Baldwin at Work

Baldwin felt a homeward pull as the growing American civil rights movement inspired desire to find his role in it. He would return to France often, but his expatriate days ended in mid-1957; he soon traveled to the American South to witness desegregation efforts. This experience and others are reflected in his second essay collection, Nobody Knows My Name (1961). This photograph is  from around the time Baldwin was preparing the book for publication. In a radio interview he explained: “I am an American writer. This country is my subject. … I had to come back to check my impressions, and, as it turned out, to be stung again, to look at it again, bear it again, and to be reconciled to it again.”