A collection of eight short stories that explore with devastating frankness the roots of love, hate, and racial conflict. By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying, this is a major work by one of America's quintessential writers.
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A collection of eight short stories that explore with devastating frankness the roots of love, hate, and racial conflict. By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying, this is a major work by one of America's quintessential writers.
Read Less
Add this copy of Going to Meet the Man: Stories to cart. $2.15, good condition, Sold by Books For Life rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Laurel, MD, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by Vintage.
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Add this copy of Going to Meet the Man: Stories to cart. $2.95, fair condition, Sold by Goodwill Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Hillsboro, OR, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by Vintage.
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Add this copy of Going to Meet the Man: Stories to cart. $7.99, very good condition, Sold by HPB-Diamond rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by Vintage.
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After reading and rereading "Go tell it on the mountain", Baldwin's first novel, I read Baldwin's 1965 collection of short stories, "Going to Meet the Man". Baldwin (1924 -- 1987) wrote in searing terms about the African American experience and about racial injustice. These stories and the early novel have a feel of individuality, passion and personal experience that to me are more basic than their depictions of American racism.
The book includes eight early stories which explore and attempt to surmount suffering and anger. Baldwin's stories find sexuality, art and religion as sources of suffering and redemption. The writing is dense and detailed in its description of places and people. The stories are set in Harlem, France, and the rural South.
Baldwin's story, "Sonny's Blues" tells the story of a blues pianist who has become addicted to heroin and of his relationship to his brother who has led a more conventional life as a teacher. The story develops slowly and carefully as it illustrates the necessity of living with purpose and of how music may bring meaning to life, both for the performers and for those listeners able to hear. I thought it the best story in the collection, and it has become deservedly famous.
The title story focuses on the life of a racist white sheriff in the rural South. Baldwin explores the racial and sexual attitudes of his protagonist and their relationship to a brutal lynching and burning the sheriff witnessed with his parents as a boy. Another story in the collection, "The Man Child". also is set in the rural South and is the only work in the volume without an explicit racial theme. It offers instead a portrayal of smoldering sexual and domestic tension, loneliness, and violence.
The life of creative performers and artists is a theme of several stories in addition to "Sonny's Blues" . "This morning, this evening, so soon" deals with an African American expatriate in Paris who has married a Swedish woman. He is about to return to the United States after a lengthy absence and fears for his young son and for the racial hostility he knows he will encounter in America. The primary character of "Come Out of the Wilderness" is a young African American woman involved in a failing relationship with a white artist. She is about to become involved in a relationship with her boss, an African American man at a large insurance company, and feels a sense of purposelessness and uncertainty. In the story, "Previous Condition" the main character also shows a sense of drift. The young African American actor at the center of the story struggles in his relationship with a Jewish friend and with a white lady friend in his failing efforts to find meaning in his life.
The first two stories in the collection, "The Rockpile" and "The Outing" explore characters and some materials that Baldwin used in "Go Tell it on the Mountain." The second of these stories, which examines a summer boating excursion along the Hudson River by the congregants of the Temple of Fire Baptized is effective in its own right and adds to the characterization of the church and its parishioners presented in the novel.
This collection offers insight into American racial tensions and into Baldwin's understanding of racial injustice. I loved the stories more for their focus on lonely troubled individuals seeking for self-understanding and for Baldwin's understanding of ambiguity, sexuality, and the power of art.
