This course offers an intensive examination of James Baldwin's work in its own contexts and in the critical contexts in which others have read it. Baldwin is not only a powerful novelist, but one of the most important political essayists of the 20th century, producing incisive scholarship, literary criticism, and analyses of contemporary U.S. race relations. We examine his contributions to each of these fields. We also consider the specific historical moments that Baldwin narrates in his fiction, as well as the historical and cultural events that shaped the creation of each novel as he wrote it. The course emphasizes the process of examining an individual author’s work in view of the literary, biographical, historical, and cultural influences that shaped it.