In December, the eclectic and questing musician Meshell Ndegeocello brought her church-themed piece “Can I Get a Witness?,” based on “Fire,” to Harlem Stage. The last few months have seen an explosion of work that either deliberately or subtly riffs on Baldwin’s life and work. The African American author feels as central as he has since he landed on the cover of Time magazine in 1963, amid turmoil in Birmingham, Ala., for the “poignancy and abrasiveness” he brought to the nation’s “dark realities.” Some of this is because the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement recalls Baldwin’s own, and because the rising visibility of homosexuality over the last few decades made a resurgence likely if not inevitable. “Baldwin is back,” says Harvard literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates.

Every writer hopes his prose will persist, but James Baldwin made an especially solid bet: As long as the disease of American racism, resentment of homosexuals, and the nation’s strange relationship with social class and capitalism lasted, his work, he knew, would matter.īut when Baldwin died 30 years ago, it would have been hard to predict that books such as “The Fire Next Time” - written as a letter to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of black emancipation - or “Giovanni’s Room” - a slender, once-obscure novel about a purportedly straight American and an Italian bartender who fall in love in Paris - would half a century later sit at the center of the zeitgeist.

James baldwin works