The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Published by Penguin Classics (1990)
Pb: 96pp
"We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation." - Baldwin
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.