The Price of the Ticket Collected Nonfiction: 1948–1985

An essential compendium of James Baldwin’s most powerful nonfiction work, calling on us “to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country.”

Personal and prophetic, these essays uncover what it means to live in a racist American society with insights that feel as fresh today as they did over the 4 decades in which he composed them. Longtime Baldwin fans and especially those just discovering his genius will appreciate this essential collection of his great nonfiction writing, available for the first time in affordable paperback. Along with 46 additional pieces, it includes the full text of dozens of famous essays from such books as:

   • Notes of a Native Son
   • Nobody Knows My Name
   • The Fire Next Time
   • No Name in the Street
   • The Devil Finds Work

This collection provides the perfect entrée into Baldwin’s prescient commentary on race, sexuality, and identity in an unjust American society.

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of America’s foremost writers. His writing explores palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America. A Harlem, New York, native, he lived periodically in exile in the south of France and in Turkey. He is the author of several novels and books of nonfiction, including Notes of a Native Son, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, Just Above My Head, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen, and of the poetry collection Jimmy’s Blues.

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Price of the Ticket
The Harlem Ghetto
Lockridge: “The American Myth”
Journey to Atlanta
Everybody’s Protest Novel
Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown
Princes and Powers
Many Thousands Gone
Stranger in the Village
A Question of Identity
The Male Prison
Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough
Equal in Paris
Notes of a Native Son
Faulkner and Desegregation
The Crusade of Indignation
A Fly in Buttermilk
The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American
On Catfish Row
Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South
The Northern Protestant
Fifth Avenue, Uptown
They Can’t Turn Back
In Search of a Majority
Notes for a Hypothetical Novel
The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King
East River, Downtown
Alas, Poor Richard
The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy
The New Lost Generation
The Creative Process
Color
A Talk to Teachers
The Fire Next Time: My Dungeon Shook
Nothing Personal
Words of a Native Son
The American Dream and the American Negro
White Man’s Guilt
A Report from Occupied Territory
Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White
White Racism or World Community?
Sweet Lorraine
No Name in the Street
A Review of Roots
The Devil Finds Work
An Open Letter to Mr. Carter
Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone
If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?
An Open Letter to the Born Again
Dark Days
Notes on the House of Bondage
Here Be Dragons

First Published