The Fire Next Time
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  • Published: 25 January 1990
  • ISBN: 9780141963778
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 96
Categories:

The Fire Next Time

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 Jul 2025
EBook
25 Jan 1990
Audiobook
4 Apr 2024
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A stirring, intimate pair of epistolary essays on the nature of race, nationhood and American history

'We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation'

James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.

'Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle ... all presented in searing, brilliant prose' The New York Times Book Review

'Baldwin writes with great passion ... it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy' Sunday Times
  • Published: 25 January 1990
  • ISBN: 9780141963778
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 96
Categories:

Also by James Baldwin

Giovanni's Room
If Beale Street Could Talk
Dark Days
The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name ; No Name In The Street; The Devil Finds Work
Notes of a Native Son
Go Tell it on the Mountain
Another Country
See all

Praise for The Fire Next Time

His prophetic warning . . . Baldwin’s words can still bring clarity to our conversations about injustice today

Guardian

Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle . . . all presented in searing, brilliant prose

The New York Times Book Review

Baldwin writes with great passion ... it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy

Sunday Times

The great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement ... his seminal work

Guardian

Riveting . . . part of Baldwin's enduring power is that he was not a political thinker. He was interested in the soul's dark spaces much more than in the body politic.

Colm Toibin, Telegraph

A true prophet . . . his thought and its utterance are nothing less than majestical

Mario Puzo, The New York Times
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