American History

i.  the illusion of a mirror / the mirror of an illusion In the fall of 1957, James Baldwin made his first trip to the Deep South. In complex ways and for even more complex reasons, he was returning to a place he’d never been before. Soon upon his ar

“It comes as a great shock,” James Baldwin said in his epochal debate against William F. Buckley at Cambridge in 1965, “around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.” It was early in the debate. The already-prominent African-American writer was speaking

James Baldwin submitted an essay, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” to Walter Lowe Jr., the first African American editor of Playboy magazine. Its radical thesis—that misguided notions of masculinity were at the root of America’s moral quan

Baldwin and His “Aliases” June 1964 Baldwin was “Jimmy” to most of his friends and to himself as well when he meditated on the various aspects of his personality. The numerous “strangers called Jimmy Baldwin,” he observed of his own diversity, included an “older brother with all the egotism and rigidity that implies,” a “self-serving little boy,” and “a man” and “a woman,

In an essay from 1941 on H.G. Wells and Nazism, Jorge Luis Borges expressed surprise that the English writer who had fictively sent worlds to war was not a Nazi. “Wells, incredibly, is not a Nazi,” Borges wrote in “Two Books,” a pensive piece that wa

I can smell Borges in my dreams, and I dream about him often. He reeks of age, with the mustiness, the sourness of years. And the odor gives off a peculiar sweetness, too, as if he has smoked ripe old tobacco in a pipe for many decades, although I su