The Private Life: On James Baldwin - The Paris Review

“All art,” he wrote, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”

Baldwin understood the singular importance of the novel, because he saw the dilemma his country faced as essentially an interior one, as his fellow citizens suffered from a poison that began in the individual spirit and then made its way into politics